Fox is Framed (9 page)

“And he confessed to you, right? That's why he had to go and invent a confession from you, because in real life he was the one who'd confessed. That's what you said.”

“He might as well have confessed. He was dumb enough. He told me plenty.” Seeing the disappointment in my face, he went on. “You know everybody in prison is innocent, Leo. None of those guys doesn't dream of one day getting out, and as soon as Russell fell in with me, he realized he had a chance. So he knew better than to confess. But I'm a good judge of character. Innocent men don't get convicted and locked up. It doesn't happen, popular myths aside.” His looked away, as if realizing that his cynicism was self-indicting.

“
Might as well have
confessed. So they let you out and he won't help you, won't pay you for your services rendered. In return, you decide to threaten him with this confession he might have made but didn't.”

“What I know is that Russell kidnapped and raped that girl, and he didn't have to confess for me to know it. I didn't kill him. What I think is maybe someone did the world a favor, shot the son of a bitch as revenge for what happened all those years ago.”

“Jackson mentioned Bo Wilder to me. It sounds like the cops have a theory that Bo was behind the hit. That he did it on your behalf.”

“Well, if he did, he didn't tell me about it. And it's not like I've got anything to offer the man.”

His quick dismissal of the idea only aroused my suspicion. “The main thing in our favor is that the cops still don't have the shooter or the gun. Still, Bell was murdered in broad daylight. It's hard to believe there weren't witnesses.” My tone sounded harsher than I intended.

“Don't get too used to picking out my own clothes is what you're telling me. Or rather, to having Dot pick them out.” He stared a thousand yards down the road. “Tell me this. Friendship aside, how much would it have cost him to hire a lawyer, and how many lawyers would have done as good a job as I did? Don't you expect to get paid?”

“It's called a retainer, and I collect it in advance. Why are you so worried about money?”

“Why aren't you? Why is anyone? It's self-respect. If you'd been inside, you'd understand the code. I had a right to name my price when I got out. It was a fair price, but that doesn't matter now. Bell's dead, and I won't pretend I'm not glad for that, when it's just you and me talking.”

His eyes went to the rearview.

An unmarked Crown Vic rounded the block and veered to the curb, leaving one parking spot between his bumper and mine.

“He's been with us the whole way,” Lawrence went on. “He picked me up as soon as I left the funeral home. Let's sightsee a little. Take him for a ride. You know where I want to go. It's about time I saw the old place again.” He glanced again at the mirror.

With Shanahan following, I drove slowly up into Potrero Hill, to the apartment building where it had all begun. A light showed in the second-floor window. It was possible the people who lived here now had no clue what had happened years ago. Probably there were few people left in the neighborhood who did. “It's almost like I could walk right back through the door, go back in time,” Lawrence said. “Although I wouldn't want to walk back into
that
.”

He glanced at me as if checking whether I was okay with him talking this way about our shared past. I stared up at the building. I'd been down the street plenty of times, of course, but never like this—never with him.

“Even if you didn't kill her, you came pretty damn close a number of times,” I said. “I remember one time you were hitting her, and she was screaming at you. Teddy finally called the police, but only because I begged him to.” Not for the first time I wondered what had been wrong with my brother that he didn't intervene more forcefully, knock my father down the way the older brother is supposed to do in the movies. In any case, he never had.

“I don't expect you to forget that. There's no excuse for a man to use his fists on a woman. The mother of his children. But I did my time for that, and I'm not the same man I was. No matter how much we may want to, neither one of us can undo the past.

“Go ahead,” he went on, seemingly oblivious to the terrible thoughts that filled my head. “Ask me anything.”

“I know Russell was lying. I don't need to ask you that again.”

He seemed to avoid answering the question I hadn't asked. “I can't imagine how that must have been for you, finding her. For years I felt it was my responsibility, to try to understand. But the mind just breaks down. Plus, I never saw you again after that day. You were a little kid. You didn't have any reason not to believe people who told you I did it. There was a trial. None of it came out right. And just when you needed me the most, I wasn't there. They wouldn't let me see you. For years, it ate me alive. I wanted to reach out, try to make you see I was innocent, but Teddy thought it best to let you alone. I'm not so sure.”

“It's my whole life,” I told him. “It doesn't turn on a dime. Certainly not on this one.”

“I know it, Leo, and I don't blame you for it. If you can learn to trust me . . .”

“No more surprises,” I said. “You need to trust
me
. And you need to trust Nina.” I realized the question I should have asked, which was where he'd been the morning of Russell Bell's murder, but somehow the moment for asking such questions had passed.

Lawrence nodded. “No more surprises.” He rolled down his window, stuck out an arm, and waved the Crown Vic forward. The unmarked car flashed its lights and drew up alongside, and the driver's side window slid down.

Lawrence leaned to the window and shouted, “‘They do me wrong and I will
not
endure it!'”

Chapter 9

On Monday Nina filed a motion under Penal Code Section 995 seeking to have the case dismissed. Her reason was that the state's only witness was dead and thus no longer available to testify against my father. Seemingly in response, Crowder moved to revoke Lawrence's bail. Both motions were heard the following Friday in Judge Liu's court.

Liu heard bail arguments first. At the podium, Crowder said, “Two weeks ago, the state's confidential informant was murdered. For nearly six hours, investigating officers from Oakland, San Francisco, and numerous other jurisdictions tried but were unable to locate the defendant. He was finally taken into custody in San Rafael, where he's been living out of the court's jurisdiction. The state asks the court to revoke bail.”

Lawrence sat stone still, not reacting after the lecture Nina'd given him following his outburst last time. She now turned in her chair to stare at Crowder with disbelief.

“You're not contending that he violated any bail condition?” the judge asked.

“His only alibi is a story from his girlfriend that they were out riding motorcycles together a hundred miles from here. This is a defendant out on
bail
. The whereabouts of Mr. Maxwell's sons are also unknown at the time of the crime.”

A murmur ran through the courtroom, and I sat bolt upright as if I'd received an electric shock. I could tell by the anger on Judge Liu's face that Crowder had miscalculated. I felt Dot lay a hand on my arm. Her eyes were cold, and she gave me a nod.
Let's get them
, her gaze seemed to say.

“It's not my place to question her story, at least not now. You don't have the murder weapon, or any evidence of his involvement. So far, all you have is motive. Am I right?”

“I'm told that phone records reveal numerous instances of contact between the defendant and the victim beginning the very day the defendant was released by this court.”

“That's pretty thin. As I understand it, they were friends in prison. Anything more?”

Crowder glanced at Shanahan, who shook his head. “The state can't reveal any more details. Especially not with the subject of the investigation sitting right here.”

“Then I'm going to deny your motion to revoke bail,” Judge Liu said. “If you'd charged him, it would be a different story. I will, however, add a no-travel condition. The defendant shall restrict his movements to San Francisco, Alameda, and Marin Counties unless he first gives notice to the prosecution and obtains permission to travel from me.”

Crowder sat down. Now it was Nina's turn. She took the podium with quiet anger but said nothing.

“I've read your motion to dismiss,” Judge Liu said. “You correctly point out that the state's case is based entirely on Detective Shanahan's testimony. You also note that with Russell Bell dead any statements Bell made to the detective or anyone else can only be introduced as hearsay. The Constitution says that criminal defendants have the right to confront their accusers. This means no hearsay. However, if it's the defendant's fault that the witness is ­unavailable—for instance because the defendant had him ­murdered—there's an exception to the no hearsay rule.”

“Your Honor is referring to the forfeiture by wrongdoing exception.”

“You'll agree with me that if Maxwell arranged for Bell to be murdered, it follows he can't reap the benefit of that act and keep Bell's hearsay statements from coming into evidence.”

“The forfeiture doctrine doesn't apply until he's proven guilty of murdering the witness,” Nina said. “As you've just noted, my client has an alibi. In addition, there would have to be a specific finding that Bell was murdered for the purpose of keeping him from testifying in this case. Not some other reason. The prosecution hasn't even come close to making that showing.”

“Thank you,” Liu said. With Crowder back at the podium, Liu probed her with questions regarding our backup argument: that the potential harmful effect of the confession might still require it to be kept out, even if the state met the low bar of producing “evidence sufficient to support a finding” that Lawrence was involved in the hit. As the judge pointed out to Crowder in a question she couldn't satisfactorily answer, he could always instruct them to ignore the confession after they'd heard it, but the jurors were human beings, and unlikely to forget it.

Seeing the battle slipping away from her, Crowder at last said, “Russell Bell's body is hardly cold. The state ought to at least be given the opportunity to develop proof that Maxwell was involved and that his alibi was a sham.”

Liu agreed, and scheduled an evidentiary hearing prior to trial. “The bar is going to be higher than just
sufficient to support a finding
, Ms. Crowder, given the devastating effect of Maxwell's alleged confession to Bell, and the likelihood that the jurors would be unable to put it out of their minds even if I instructed them in the strongest terms to do so. To get that confession into evidence without Bell as a witness, you're going to have to prove to me that it's at least more likely than not that Maxwell was behind Bell's murder—and you've got five weeks to do it.”

~ ~ ~

“I'm incensed,” Nina said after the hearing. The others had gone home. I'd accompanied her to her office to take stock. She went on. “It's one thing to accuse your father, but now they're trying to drag you and Teddy in. The implication of what she said is that you and your brother are suspects in Bell's murder. A family vendetta is what it's starting to look like.”

“You think they're going after Teddy and me.” I was struck again by how she'd reversed positions. Just last week, she'd all but accused Teddy of being involved.

“It's what they'd like to do.” Seeming to become aware that she'd changed viewpoints, she said, “With every case, every client, there's an initial holding back. You want to maintain that distance, that objectivity, as long as you can. But for me, when it comes to certain cases, there's a tipping point. Starting today, I've reached it.”

“You seem different. Maybe more relaxed.”

“I'm angry. It's a good anger. Invigorating.” She looked at me for a moment across the desk, and I felt a spark pass between us before her focus snapped back. “Now what's this about calls from your office to Bell?”

I told her what I'd found in the phone records, information I should have given her before. I had no good explanation for having held back, so I offered no excuse.

The spark was extinguished now. “Anything else I ought to know?”

“I went to the funeral home. Dad was there. So was Jackson Gainer. Like he was standing guard. Shanahan, the detective, also turned up.” I thought of my father's admission that he'd tried to get money from Bell. No point in sharing that with her now.

“Jackson Gainer. Standing guard over what? What else?”

“He told me that the DA thinks that a man named Bo Wilder may have been behind Bell's murder. Bo's in San Quentin, but he has people on the outside. He protected my father when there was a price on his head.”

She studied me skeptically, processing this new information. “I don't want to lose this case because you end up stumbling on something best kept under wraps.”

“Don't worry, I've got plenty of my own cases to work.”

“Good. I'm glad to hear it.”

Chapter 10

My practice was in the doldrums, and little money was coming in. Ever since Lawrence's release, I'd more or less stopped meeting with new clients. This was foolish, yet his case seemed to loom over everything, eclipsing more lucrative bids for my attention. Teddy's phone, on the other hand, was ringing off the hook.

Despite my doubts, our father seemed to be living up to his end of the bargain he'd made with him. Every week it seemed another incarcerated client or family member called wanting Teddy to write an appeal or a habeas petition, and his tiny office was suddenly cluttered with boxes of transcripts. I had depositions to take in my civil cases, discovery to review, motions to file, but whenever I turned to this real work I had to fight through dread.

The next Saturday, the sky was gray outside my office window, and around two a misting rain began to fall, dashing my plans for a ride. I'd been up late at my desk going through transcripts of my father's first trial, adding to the collection of empty beer cans in my wastebasket. After three hours of desultory effort, I moved to the wing chair in the corner and closed my eyes, a transcript open on my lap.

The phone rang. When I answered it, I heard, “This is Eric Gainer. How are you, Leo?”

Hearing his voice instantly conjured up those old pot-smoking, punk-rock-listening days. Even back then, when he was a teenager, Eric could be irresistible. His attention, when he turned it on anyone, was like a beam of warmth. His voice was familiar to me in recent years only from the news. We hadn't spoken directly to one another since high school.

“It's been a while,” I replied. “I don't get over to the city much these days.” There was nothing much else to say.

He got to the point. “Jackson said you wanted to talk to me.”

“That's right. Strictly off the record. For old times' sake.”

“Why don't you come to my place. It's Jackson's, actually. Give me a ring when you're almost here. I'll open the garage and you can park inside.” Was it that he didn't want to be seen with me? It made sense, since my father'd been accused of murdering a man who'd worked for him. I tried not to let it bother me, but it did.

I drove into the city to the address I'd written down. The impressive Cow Hollow house was perched three stories above a garage, which opened as I turned onto Gainer's street. I pulled up over the sidewalk and inside. Eric met me at the door. We stood in his kitchen swapping reminiscences, quickly exhausting the safe subjects in our shared past. “You shoot pool?” he presently asked.

He led me upstairs to a den with bookshelves, a fireplace, and a pool table. There was also a corner bar and two narrow windows facing the street below. The books on the shelves appeared to have been read, their spines creased. Along the rails, the only way to complete cross-table shots was to clear the books from a section of shelf, providing another foot of space to draw back the cue.

I'd asked for the meeting, and I knew that if I wanted answers, I needed to take the lead. “I won't beat around the bush. I came here because I wanted to ask you about your relationship with Russell Bell. Do you mind telling me how on earth you came to hire him?”

He nodded, unsurprised by the question. “You and I both know that it doesn't fix anything to lock people up. The most advanced civilization on earth, but we're still medieval in the way we punish crime. Someday, with luck, I'll be in a position to have a real influence on our policies. Imprisonment isn't a solution. It's the heart of our problem. When these people finally get out, no one will trust them. What choice do they have but to go back to a life of crime?”

“You can't mean that hiring Russell was about practicing good public policy.”

“Of course not. It wasn't anybody's business but mine. He was on my private payroll, not the city's. Actually, I hired him because it was the only thing I could think to do to make amends for the mess Gary Coles and I made of his life.”

So that was it. Liberal guilt. I ought to have known. “Then I'm more impressed. You're the first politician who behaves in a worthy manner and doesn't feel the need to tell the whole world about it.”

“Worthy? I don't know. I haven't talked about this with anybody. Not in the sense of what it means to me, privately. What it's meant in my life.” He was arranging the balls in the triangle, clacking them back and forth. He looked up. “The thing is, I'd actually like to talk about it with you.”

It struck me that I was about to cede control of our conversation. But if he was willing to talk, I was ready to listen.

Eric handed me a cue. “You take the first shot. We won't play for money.”

I broke, but nothing fell. Then it was Eric's turn. The intent, familiar way he moved around the table made me realize how much time he must spend here. It was where he did his thinking, I guessed. He'd poured us both Scotch. He made his shots with casual ease, hardly seeming to notice that I was in the game. I wasn't, not really. The game wasn't the point. It was just something to do with his body while we talked.

“I know what people say about me, that my whole career is built out of what happened the day of that kidnapping, my feeble attempt at heroism. Without that experience, I don't even think I'd ever have dreamed about going into politics.”

“You were a hero,” I said. “I remember that much.”

“But I didn't
do
anything,” he said, as if still angry at himself after all these years.

“You did everything you could. You chased the van down. You all but pulled the guy out from behind the wheel, with the girl lying there, terrified, a sack over her head. You got all skinned up when he sped away and you finally fell off, and then you were out there nonstop, putting up posters, comforting the family until she was found alive. You were a legitimate hero. Everyone admired you.”

“And I took full advantage of it, didn't I.”
Thunk
in the corner pocket. “It was just like being a basketball star, everyone looking at me, thinking how great I was. Then Gary Coles came along and I signed my deal with the devil.”

I wondered why he was telling me all this but I didn't interrupt. “Christ, he made it easy to lie. I don't think I'd ever felt so good about anything as I did about the lies I told during that trial. He made lying seem like a selfless, heroic act, like the natural culmination of what I'd done out there on the street, chasing the abductor down and trying to grab him. All I had to do was say that I saw his face, that they'd gotten the right guy, and I could go on being a hero. And that's what I did, Leo—and I never looked back. Not until they came to me years later and said he was getting out, that I needed to testify in the retrial. The thought of it made me physically ill.”

I looked at him with new understanding, and new caution. “A lot of well-meaning people lied because Gary Coles made them feel it was the right thing. You weren't the only one.”

“That's cold comfort for someone who's always held himself to a higher standard. Or tried to. Anyway, the majority of those people weren't actually well-meaning. From what I understand, most of the cops had figured out that Coles would cover their tracks for them. Anything for a conviction. And no one ever caught him.”

“My brother did.”

“Maybe, but only after he was dead, and only by using Coles's own tactics.” He missed his shot and straightened. “Or are you going to tell me you really believe your father's innocent?”

I missed badly. He caught the cue ball as it dropped into the corner pocket.

“I do,” I answered him. “I wouldn't have been involved with freeing him if I didn't.”

“Principled stand. I hope you believe it. Well, here's to avoiding hypocrisy.” He raised his glass and positioned the cue ball where he wanted it. “Russell sent me a letter after I was first elected. He wanted my help reopening the case. He wanted me to admit I'd lied in my testimony, sign a statement to that effect. I left that letter out on my desk for a long time. It was followed a few months later by a second one accusing me of the most cynical motivations: of using the opportunity his case had given me to launch my political career and reap personal gain, all at the expense of his life.

“It struck me as the letter of an innocent man. It affected me more deeply than you could imagine. The consciousness of that lie had been stewing in me, and the letter was like a storm breaking. I'd put all that behind me, I thought, made amends in my own way. But, of course, not to Russell. His life was still ruined. He was still in the joint. I never responded to either letter, but after Russell got out with your father's help, and after I told the DA that I couldn't testify in the retrial, Russell came to see me, and I offered him a job as my driver.”

“Just like that,” I said. We were standing across the pool table from one another. Neither of us had taken a shot in some time.

“Just like that,” Eric repeated, as if bewildered by his own act. “What would you have done? What can anyone do for a man like that?”

I wouldn't have lied and helped Gary Coles frame the man in the first place, I wanted to say. Instead I asked him, “How did you stand it, having him there in the car with you day after day, reminding you of what you'd done? He was in prison for how long, twelve years?”

Eric moved the cue ball, giving himself a better line on the corner pocket. I hadn't scratched, so he shouldn't have touched it, but it was his table. His rules. “The more pertinent question is how did I stand it knowing he was in prison, knowing it was my fault, during all those years when he
wasn't
driving my car?”

“What was he holding over you, Eric?”

He grabbed the cue ball and rolled it fast into the corner pocket, then flung his cue onto the table. “I don't know what you're hinting at. The reason I asked you here is that I just need your father to—back off for a while.”

“What do you mean, ‘back off'?”

“Your father called the office a number of times. I asked Jackson to handle it, and I told Jackson I didn't want to hear the details. From what I gather, your father thought he could shake down Russell, or shake me down, about something connected with that old case. Maybe he wanted money. Maybe he thought I could have some influence on his behalf in the DA's office, get the charges thrown out, who knows. I told Russell that if he ever had trouble with anyone about the past, if anyone ever tried to use his background as leverage, he should come to me.”

“Maybe he wanted to warn you about Russell.”

“I hardly needed
warning.
I knew all about Russell.”

The edge in his voice made me look up. “What is it? What's going on?”

Gainer just shook his head. “You need to make your father understand that he's not going to get out of this mess by threatening me.”

“
Threatening
you? I don't know what you're talking about, Eric.”

“You really don't know what he's been doing, do you?” He left the room. I followed him. There was an office nook in the corner of the next room. From a desk drawer he took out a sheet of paper and held it in front of me. I reached for it, but he snatched it back. “Look, but don't touch.”

It was a printout of an e-mail sent to his official city e-mail address. The From line was an e-mail address composed of gibberish letters, from an anonymizer website. A picture had been attached to the e-mail, but it wasn't displayed on the printout. Rather, a file name was listed in the attachments field in the header, a series of digits corresponding to a date and time, like the file name a digital camera automatically gives to a picture.

This one had evidently been taken on the eleventh of February at 3:32:29
am
, because the file name was 0211033229.jpg. It was April now. I made an effort to burn those digits into my memory. The message said,
You've been a very bad boy, Eric, and I know all about it. Now will you follow my instructions? Keep ignoring me, and you'll get what Russell got.

“Now do you see?” Eric asked me. “You want that coming out in court? Is that what your father wants?”

“You can't prove he sent this.” My mind, however, had flown back to my father's near admission that he'd blackmailed Bell, and to his earlier attempt to get out of prison by falsely accusing Santorez of having my brother shot.

“You can't prove he didn't.”

“This can't come into evidence. It was sent from an anonymizer website, untraceable.” At least not without a court order, but I didn't want to think about that. My father, having spent the last twenty years in prison, would have no inkling about IP addresses, cookies, Internet history folders, the invisible trail that every online action leaves.

“Where's the picture? What does it show?” I wanted to know.

“Never mind,” Eric said. “Just pass the message to your father. He needs to back off if he doesn't want this coming to light.”