False Testimony (3 page)

“Advising you is part of our job,” Harry tries again.

“And you already done that part,” Holliston fires back. “I ain’t takin’ your advice. And I’m the boss here. So give it a rest. Get to the other part of your job. Tellin’ me how to tell them people what happened that night. I want it done right. I want everything crystal clear. And I don’t want nothin’ left out.”

Harry drums his fingers on the table and his eyes move to mine. He’s resigned. Holliston is correct; at this particular point in the process, he
is
the boss. He claims he acted only as necessary to preserve his own life. If the jury believes him, he’ll walk away a free man. And like it or not, we have a duty to try to make that happen.

Harry stops drumming and again leans back on the two rear legs of his chair, staring at Holliston. He cups his hands behind his head, fingers laced, elbows akimbo, and takes a deep breath. “Go ahead,” he says to our system-savvy client at last. “Tell us your tale.”

My son is a freshman at Boston College. He finished first-semester finals on Friday and he’s home now for winter break. I’m surprised to see his pickup in the driveway of our Windmill Lane cottage, though, when Harry and I pull up at six o’clock. I thought Luke would be out with his buddies by now, cruising Main Street or shooting pool at the Piping Plover Pub.

Harry and I hang our damp coats on hooks inside the kitchen door before we wander into the living room. The woodstove is crackling and the TV is on—local news just beginning—but no one’s watching. Luke hustles down the stairs and Danny Boy, our twelve-year-old Irish setter, saunters behind, his tail wagging instantly at the sight of his buddy Harry. “Mom,” Luke says as his six-foot-three frame stoops in front of the mirror above the couch, “I’m really glad you’re here.”

This sentiment can mean only one thing: my son is broke.

“Could you float me some cash?” he asks, running one hand through the thin black locks he inherited from me. “I’ll pay you back when I’m working.”

“And when will that be?” I know the answer, of course. No time soon. Long after this loan and dozens of others have faded from memory.

He tugs at his chin, struggling to figure out the answer to my perplexing question. “Summer,” he says. “I’ll pay you back in the summer.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was serious. I find a twenty in my jacket pocket and hand it to him.

He winces.

“What?” I ask. “You need more?”

“Maybe another?” he says, his voice pleading.

“Another what?”

“Another twenty?” He squints when he says this, almost closing his eyes against his own request.

“You need forty bucks?”

“I have a date,” he says, “and I want to take her someplace decent.”

Harry pulls his tattered wallet from his back pants pocket and presses a second twenty into Luke’s palm. “I’ll contribute,” Harry says. “Young love is one of my favorite causes.”

I expect Luke to balk at the mention of love, but he doesn’t. “Hey, thanks,” he says instead, punching Harry on the arm. “I’m good for it. Honest.”

Harry flops down in the middle of the couch, props his feet on the coffee table, and spreads his arms out across the top cushions. Danny Boy hops up and sits beside him, then curls into a big ball and rests his graying head on Harry’s lap. They both watch Luke stoop again to double-check his hair in the mirror. “Who is she?” Harry laughs, scratching Danny Boy’s ears. “Who’s the lucky lass?”

“You won’t believe it,” Luke says, grabbing his parka from the closet under the stairs. “She’s the Senator’s daughter. And she’s great.”

I freeze. “Which senator?”

“Kendrick,” he answers, zipping his coat. “Abby Kendrick. I just met her a few days ago.”

“How’d
that
happen?” Senator Kendrick and his wife have only one child. And everyone in the Commonwealth knows she’s following her father’s footsteps through the hallowed halls of Harvard. She’s a sophomore this year.

Luke shrugs. “Her roommate is dating a guy in my dorm,” he says. “And they finished with finals an entire week before we did. A week and a day,” he adds, as if the extra day is what really frosts him. “They finished last Thursday.” He shakes his head. “Last Thursday,” he repeats, certain Harry and I would be sobbing by now if we’d heard him the first time.

“Anyway, they came over to visit the night they finished and a bunch of us went out for Thai to celebrate, I guess. Course, the girls were the only ones who had anything to celebrate then. They went home after dinner; we went back to the dorm to study for more crummy exams. But Abby and I ended up sitting next to each other at the Thai place, and we got to talking. She’s staying in town with her folks—they have a summer place on Old Harbor Road—through the holidays. So I asked if she’d like to grab a bite sometime and she said
sure
.” He turns to Harry. “Can you believe it? She said
sure.
”

Harry kicks his shoes off and loosens his tie. “Life is good,” he tells Danny Boy, “whenever she says
sure
.”

“Hey, look at that,” Luke says. “There she is.”

For a split second, I think Abby must have come to our door. Luke’s eyes don’t move in that direction, though. He’s staring at the TV. And there she is.

Senator Kendrick is on-screen, flanked by his wife and daughter. His lips are moving, but it’s not his words we hear. Instead, a talking head in the upper right corner tells us the Senator held a press conference outside his Chatham home at four o’clock today. He repeated the detailed descriptions we’ve been hearing on the news all day—of Michelle Forrester, her electric-blue BMW roadster, and the clothes she was wearing when she was last seen four days ago. He pleaded for anyone with information about her—no matter how insignificant it might seem—to come forward. He also gave out a newly established 800 number for his D.C. office. His staff, he said, would gladly accept calls from persons not willing to contact the police directly.

So much for my
keep your mouth shut
admonition. Harry’s right. My newest client isn’t very good at following directions.

Luke zips up his parka, then walks closer to the TV screen and points at the Senator’s daughter. “Is she great,” he says, turning back to face Harry and me, “or what?”

My son is right. Abby Kendrick is tall and lean—athletic looking—with dark red hair, an alabaster complexion, and finely carved features like her father’s. She’s perfectly poised in front of the cameras. And she’s stunning.

Harry lets out a low whistle as he gets up from the couch and pulls two more twenties from his wallet. “Take her someplace better than decent,” he says, handing the folded bills to Luke. “And tell her to order the lobster.”

A grown woman who voluntarily refers to herself as “Honey” is suspect in my book. The Senator’s wife has a perfectly serviceable given name—Nell—but she prefers her nectar nickname instead. When she attends her husband’s public appearances—campaign stops, fund-raisers, and press conferences—she insists that the members of the media address her by her self-imposed moniker. And now, in her state-of-the-art, sun-drenched kitchen, she demands the same of me. “Please, dear,” she says each time I speak to her, “call me Honey.” The result, of course, is that I’ve stopped calling her anything at all.

This is the first time I’ve met Mrs. Kendrick and I’m not surprised to find her ill at ease, uncomfortable in her own skin. That’s exactly how she always seems on television, no matter what the occasion. It took ten minutes to convince her that I really do take my coffee black, that I’m not refusing her repeated offers of cream and sugar out of some misguided sense of propriety. At this rate, the quick chat I’d planned to have with her and her husband this morning will take the rest of the calendar year.

The spacious, all-white kitchen is on the landward side of the house. A rectangular wrought-iron table and six matching, cushioned chairs are situated in an alcove a few feet from glass sliders. The Senator and I are settled across from each other, coffee mugs in hand, my beat-up briefcase on the slate floor beside my chair. We’ve been here fifteen minutes now, waiting for Honey to join us.

She’s an attractive woman, but I suspect she’s high-maintenance as well. She’s lean like her husband and daughter but not as tall as either of them, with a winter tan and short, salon-assisted amber hair. Honey-colored, I realize as I watch her from across the room. In tailored dark slacks, a powder blue cashmere sweater, and pumps, she looks like she thinks I came here this morning to take photos. It’s a good thing I didn’t; Honey seems constitutionally unable to stop moving. She flutters around the room, opening and closing drawers and cupboards; stacking and restacking newspapers and magazines on the counter; offering us coffee cake, fruit, and yogurt.

“Not for me,” I tell her a third time. Her husband says no again too, then stares through the sliders to the snow-covered yard and the neighboring bungalow. Mrs. Kendrick turns her back to us, roots through the supersize, stainless steel refrigerator, and delivers a fruit salad and three vanilla yogurts to the table anyway. “Honey,” the Senator says quietly, “please join us. Marty doesn’t have all day.”

He’s right about that. I’m supposed to meet Harry at the House of Correction at ten—an hour from now—and it’s a forty-minute drive from here. Today we’ll do our best to prepare Derrick Holliston for cross-examination. And though it’s impossible to know how cross will go for any client—or any witness, for that matter—with Holliston we know one thing for sure: it’ll get ugly.

Mrs. Kendrick nods at her husband’s request and wipes her hands on a terry-cloth towel. She doesn’t sit, though. She leans against one slider, wrings the red-checkered towel, and turns her attention to me. I’d better get to the point, I guess. She doesn’t look like she plans to stand still for long.

“You need to be quiet,” I tell them both.

“What?” the Senator says.

There’s no doubt in my mind that he heard me. He just can’t wrap his brain around the message. “About Michelle Forrester,” I add. “You need to zip it, publicly and privately. No more press conferences. No more media events of any kind. No more conversation about her, unless it’s with me.”

The Senator looks into his coffee mug for a moment. When his eyes meet mine again, they’re angry. “That’s impossible,” he says.

“Then you need to find a new attorney.”

He sets his mug down, hard. “Are you threatening me?”

“No,” I assure him. “But I am telling you I’m a defense lawyer, not a magician. I can’t protect your interests if you can’t keep your mouth shut.”

“You’re being unreasonable,” he says. “That young woman worked for me every day for the past three and a half years and she’s vanished without a trace. You expect me to stand by and say nothing?”

“That’s right. Until we get a handle on what’s happened here, that’s exactly what I expect.”

He looks into his mug again, silent for now. I turn to his wife. She shifts away from me, leans sideways, the towel still taut between her clenched hands. Her shoulder presses against the glass and her gaze settles on the shingled bungalow next door. “And I expect it from both of you,” I tell her.

She doesn’t react at first, as if she’s receiving my words via satellite. “Me?” she says at last. “What in the world do I have to do with it?”

“Plenty. At this point, anyone who ever crossed paths with Michelle Forrester has something to do with it.”

Honey looks over at her husband and gives him a tight, decidedly unsweetened smile. He doesn’t look back at her, though; he’s still staring into his mug. “Well,” she says, “Michelle and I certainly crossed
paths.
”

I intend to find out what she means by that, but quick footsteps on the stairs in the next room make me hold my tongue. Abby Kendrick breezes into the kitchen in gray sweats and white sneakers, her long, lustrous hair in a loose ponytail. She pours a tall glass of orange juice from the ceramic pitcher on the counter before she looks up at any of us. Her pale, gray-blue eyes match her father’s; they widen as she takes her first sip. “Oh,” she says, “sorry. I didn’t know we had company.”

“Abby”—her father lifts his coffee mug toward me—“this is Ms. Nickerson.”

She gives me a little wave from across the room.

“Call me Marty,” I say, hoping I don’t sound too much like Honey.

She nods, studying me as she takes another swallow. Her expression says she’s certain she knows me from somewhere but can’t quite put her finger on it.

I know how she recognizes me, of course, and I wonder if Abby needs her gorgeous gray-blues examined. Aside from our nine-inch height difference, Luke and I are dead ringers for each other. We share the same black hair, fair skin, and dark blue eyes. She realizes before I say anything, though. “You’re Luke Ellis’s mom, aren’t you?” she says. “God, you look just like him.”

I nod, swallowing the urge to point out that it’s actually the other way around.

“I had dinner with him last night,” she tells me.

“So I heard. He managed to squeeze me in for five minutes before he dashed out to pick you up.” I have no idea what Luke would’ve wanted me to say in response to Abby’s comment, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t it.

She raises one eyebrow. “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

I nod again, amazed. My son must have mentioned his mother.

She sets her glass on the counter, looks from one parent to the other, then frowns. “Why are the two of you talking to a lawyer?”

Her mother walks toward her—and away from our discussion—before the question ends. “It doesn’t concern you, Abigail.”

Abby stares at her father, her eyes saying she fully expects an answer. He hesitates for a moment, watching his wife’s back, then meets his daughter’s gaze. “We’re discussing the Forrester matter,” he says.

“What about it?” This time the question is directed at me, but the Senator answers first. “We’re talking about the investigation,” he says. “That’s all.”

Abby folds her arms and smirks. “Investigation? Please. No need for an investigation. I know exactly what happened.” She stares angrily at her father. “And so do you.”

“Abigail,” her mother snaps, “this isn’t the time.”

“Too much nose candy.” Abby fires her words at me, ignoring her mother. “That’s what happened. Too much white stuff up the nose.”

Silence. For a moment, no one in the room seems to breathe. Even the perpetually mobile Honey is paralyzed.

Finally, the Senator takes a deep breath and turns to me. “Michelle had a problem,” he says, “a couple of years back. But she was past that. She’d put it behind her.”

“Oh, right.” Abby laughs, but it’s not a happy one. She takes her half-empty glass of juice from the counter and heads out of the kitchen. “Sure she did,” she calls over her shoulder, her ponytail bobbing. “And she gave up
men
too. The word on the street is she was headed straight for the convent.”

Honey scowls at her husband, slaps her twisted towel on the counter and follows her daughter toward the living room. She pauses, though, in the doorway, and turns back to me. “I’ll be happy to abide by your instructions,” she says. “As far as I’m concerned, the name Michelle Forrester need never be mentioned again.”

Senator Kendrick plants his elbows on the table and buries his face in his hands as his wife leaves the kitchen. I set down my coffee mug, check my watch, and wait. I had two appointments scheduled for this morning. This was supposed to be the easy one.