Obstruction of Justice (18 page)

"Yessir. Drove up from San Francisco."

"How come you didn’t associate local counsel and save yourself a trip? This isn’t a big case, as I see it, anyway." Nina winced at this. Her client, a passenger in a cab that had rear-ended a bus on Lake Tahoe Boulevard the year before, thought it was a very big case.

"That’s right, Your Honor. The damages are minimal, except her client’s got some ludicrous inflated figure in his head—"

"Did you talk outside?"

"We’ve offered five thousand plus the specials just for the nuisance value, and she’s rejected our offer. The only thing she’s been talking about is a trial in this Court, which would be a waste of the Court’s time. This is a small case that belongs in Municipal Court. Absurd—"

Milne said, "Five thousand in hand, Nina. Your statement of damages shows mostly chiropractic fees. It’s a soft-tissue case. Nothing on the MRI. Lots of sound and fury ..."

"The medical bills are already sixty-five hundred and my client will be in chiropractic therapy for another few months at least," said Nina. "He lost his job when his sick leave ran out. What kind of offer is five thousand for seventeen months of pain and suffering? The cabdriver told my client he had been driving for fourteen hours without a break. He had his girlfriend in the front seat, which is a blatant violation of the cab company’s own rules, and was in the middle of a heated argument with her when he rear-ended the bus. His boss knew the driver rode around with this girl all day. We could up the ante and add in a count against the company for reckless endangerment, maybe start talking about punitive damages—"

"Oh, get real!" huffed Bailey. "That’s imposs—"

"Don’t interrupt me!" Nina interrupted.

"The truth is, Judge, she sees the deep pockets. She’s on us like a wasp looking for bare skin to sting—"

"Typical, isn’t it, Your Honor? Bog me down with paper and delays, make me try the case just to squeeze out a little help for a guy who has to live in a neck brace—"

Milne said, "Come in," looking beseechingly at the door for deliverance. Deputy Kimura, who had been knocking, stuck his head in and said, "The jury’s back."

"Glory be," Milne said, jumping up and adjusting his robes. "You folks go down to the clerk’s office before five and select a trial date together. Mr. Bailey, learn some manners before I see you again. Nina, if I were you I’d tell my client to adjust his expectations downward. I’d assess this case at this point at less than twenty-five thousand. You’re going to end up in Muni Court if you don’t settle it. You might even expose your client to payment of the insurance company’s court costs."

"Twenty-five. Outrageous," announced her pompous young opponent.

"And you, Mr. Bailey. Talk to someone in your office with some experience and sage advice before you come back. You annoy me."

"I was just trying to—"

"Now get out of here! Both of you!"

Nina and Bailey wrangled the whole time they were waiting for the busy clerk to give them some trial dates. They finally settled on a date three months away, which would certainly be continued several times before any trial could actually take place. Bailey gave her a crocodile smile as he headed for the stairs.

Young Bailey might well show those big sharp teeth. He had cold-bloodedly confounded yet another simple case by doing exactly the job the company paid him to do—namely, postponing, hassling, and complicating matters until her client ran out of money and forced her to settle low. Nina went back to relay the bad news.

Her client’s bench was empty. He must have gone into the main courtroom, the one Milne had headed for earlier, drooling with anticipation of a settlement. As she slipped through the door, spotting her client in the audience, the jurors Milne had been waiting for were filing back into the jury box, their faces unreadable.

With shock, Nina saw Collier sitting at one of the counsel tables, back rigorously straight, his face, what she could see of it in half-profile, dispassionate. His second chair, Barbara Banning, who had just transferred to Tahoe three months before, sat beside him, her usually wild dark hair twisted tightly into the sprayed French roll of a busy woman on a bad hair day.

This must be the big case he had been working on for the past year. At the other table, several extra chairs had been pulled up for the three male defendants and their lawyers, including the odious Jeffrey Riesner.

Nina whispered the bad news to her client. He listened, his eagerness fading, his face above the uncomfortable brace looking crestfallen. He had gotten his hopes up, even though she had warned him not to expect much.

After he left, Nina stayed. She wanted to hear the verdict. In spite of Collier’s surface cool, he was sweating under the collar about this one, she knew. She could only imagine the all-nighters he’d pulled on this case. In addition to demonstrating his genuine sympathy for the family of the victim in this murder case, a win today would spiff up the invisible star he wore on his lapel, the star of a lawman. It might even win him the election for county district attorney.

She was vexed with herself. No wonder he had been so hard to reach. His jury had been out. How could she have been so busy with her own concerns not to know it?

He would get his convictions, as he usually did. Afterward, she would go up and congratulate him, and invite him out for a celebratory drink. The dark air that had hung around him since their hike would fly away and they would laugh and talk as they had before.... She bore the hardness of the wooden bench with a smile, thinking how much she wanted that.

Milne rocketed through the preliminaries, scanning the verdict form handed to him with brusque efficiency. The bailiff handed the form to the clerk, who handed it back to the jury forewoman. Relatives of the defendants had come breathlessly in during this process, and Barbet Cain, the Tahoe Mirror reporter, sat in the back with her photographer, but otherwise the courtroom was empty. The lawyers and the defendants were standing.

The forewoman, who Nina recognized as the local community college’s head librarian, stood up and, stumbling over the unfamiliar names, read out the verdicts as to each defendant.

"Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty." Screams of joy from the relatives as each verdict was read. The defendants grabbed their lawyers and each other, one of them crying from relief. The jury looked unhappy. Collier—she couldn’
_t
see his face, but his shoulders had hunched forward at each of the not guiltys, and she could imagine well enough how he felt. Barbara Banning actually put an arm around his shoulder, as if to steady him.

It was going to be a very bad night for Collier. When Milne let them all go on the dot of five o’clock, she tried to catch up with him, but he was talking in the hall to several of the jurors. An expression of savage pain and humiliation crossed his face when he saw that she had been in the courtroom. His eyes went back to the jurors, who were saying they felt bad but the State just hadn’t beaten the reasonable doubt standard.

He didn’t want to talk to her. She went down the stairs, worried about him.

By seven, back at Caesars, Paul had showered and brushed his hair for an extra minute or two. Downstairs at the florist’s he had found a bunch of sunflowers from the valleys below, their huge heads languishing but still a luminous gold.

Greeting him at the gate, brown and barefoot in the warm dusk of evening, Kim wore only a pale cotton sheath. As she turned and walked in front of him toward the lantern-lit courtyard there was a loaded moment as Paul previewed her nakedness beneath the flimsy dress.

"How is your work coming?" she asked when they had settled behind a couple of martinis. Candles flickered around her face, their warm light playing along the brown throat with its necklace of amethysts.

"The fins helped. I may have found the car." "I’m so glad. I feel stupid, not being able to describe things concretely. But the colors ... I have all the colors right."

"There’s one color left in the picture we haven’t identified."

"Yes. The green. In front. You noticed that. The driver was ... green. That’s the only way I can put it."

"Wearing something green?"

"I don’t remember the hair, or the face. Just the color. I don’t think when I paint. I never said ’This is the car, this is the blacktop.’ The blocks of color form themselves. What I painted was the emotion I felt. The white is tempered with grayish tones; the orange is shaded with blue; the green is an acid, almost metallic, green. The painting is violent and tragic in color. And yet some of the blocks obviously do represent what I saw, the car especially. So maybe the green does represent something real. I don’t know. It’s so frustrating!"

"You’ve done very well," Paul said soothingly. He drew her hand with its pale almond nails to him, and held it, examining a faint blue stain of color in the crook between her thumb and forefinger. "Nice hands," he said, kissing that place. She let him turn it over and kiss her palm. "What have you been painting? Can I see it after dinner?"

"A little picture of the cactus garden."

Paul sucked on his olive. "I admire people who are creative."

"It seems to me that your work can be quite creative."

"Yeah. Actually, it is," Paul said, surprised. "I never thought of it that way."

"You have to be willing to fail occasionally, to make a fool of yourself."

"No problem. I do that all the time."

She had a way of appreciating him with her eyes that he found extremely flattering. She was doing it to him again, hypnotizing him with her movements and eyes and scent. She wore a musing smile.

"I’d like to paint you, Paul. In the nude," she said.

He laughed, his mind springing involuntarily to her rendition of the old man cactus. He tried to imagine himself in the abstract, plunked down in those outlandish colors. He couldn’t.

"I’m serious. Blond men are a challenge to paint, because the gradations in color are so subtle."

"Me subtle? That’s a new one."

Her eyes moved up and down on him. "Your name is Dutch, but you have the build of a Swede or a Dane, big-boned and muscular."

Her objective attitude finally took hold of him. He listened to the soft words coming from her perfectly cut lips.

"I’d like to paint you sitting there drinking a martini from that crystal glass in candlelight...."

"Stark naked?"

"Mmm-hmm. I wonder ... would you mind removing your shirt?"

"Not at all," Paul said politely, and he had the polo shirt off his back so fast, he almost spilled his drink.

She got up and approached him, moving languidly, her voice dreamy. "See how the light glints off the blond hair on your chest," she murmured, running a professional finger across his nipple.

Paul’s shirt fell forgotten from his hand.

"Please don’t move—I like to ... examine the effect."

She touched him with fingers like feathers, dusting them patiently over his cheek, his hair, his shoulders, over a heart that thudded so mightily it seemed to leap out of his skin. Suddenly, somewhere down around his tenderly cultivated washboard abs, she hesitated.

Scented hair floated around her head. He couldn’t see her face.

"You know," she said, her voice faint as if she were far away, "it’s a lot to ask, but I’d really like to see your legs. Do you think you could—here, let me help." And she pulled his slacks and BVDs down his legs and right off him. The fingers started up again, cruising along his calf, migrating up his thigh.

She knelt down in front of his colossal erection.

And then, she picked up his foot. She held it, as if weighing it, and turned it this way and that. "If you don’t mind, Paul, lean back a little. That’s good. Close your eyes and relax your muscles. Put your arms behind your head, that’s very good ... yes, I like that very much...."

A long silence ensued. Paul’s nerves strained for the touch of her velvety mouth. C’mon, baby, c’mon.

Titillated beyond endurance, he waited.

14

"SO THEN WHAT HAPPENED?" HALLOWELL SAID first thing on Saturday morning in Paul’s room at Caesars. Paul sat cross-legged as usual on the bed with his coffee, but Hallowell seemed unable to sit down. He wandered from the window to the door, back and forth.

Paul was shocked by Hallowell’s appearance. He seemed to be aging more every day. He hadn’t bothered to comb his hair and his eyes had the glazed look of the sleep-deprived.

Paul had been reporting on his progress in the Meade case, but then he had veered onto something that he thought might cheer Hallowell up.

"Nothing happened. I vogued like a Madonna stand-in, quivering all over, until I had to have a quick look. She had moved back to her seat without a sound and was tasting her drink, smiling. She said, ’Shall we have our salad?’ "

"That’s all that happened? You’re not leaving something out?"

"That’s it. ’Shall we have our salad,’ she says, cool as a ... an olive."

"What did you do?"

"We had our salad."

"You had your salad?"

"Lots of croutons. Fresh black pepper. Artichoke hearts. Tomatoes. Avocado. She wouldn’t let me touch her all evening."

"She was teasing you."

"She was toying with me as no man has ever been toyed with before. Righteously. I was so turned on, and she hardly laid her soft little paws on me. Each little touch was like—oh, man, when it does happen, it’s gonna be so good."

"If it happens. She left a message at my office this morning. She wants to review her statement. She says she’s trying again to jog her memory."

"What do you mean, if it happens?"

"All I mean is—"

"You think she’s just fooling around with me. Like you’re fooling around with Nina."

"Nina? What has she got to do with this?"

"Well, the deeper you get into your wife’s death, the less time you have for her. I hate seeing her hurt."

Hallowell turned to look at him, cocking his head. "Who are you, her brother from Montenegro?"

"Yeah, that’s me. Her big brother," Paul said. "You’re letting this wear you down, man. You’re putting yourself under a monster strain. You’re in court all day with the creeps and the criminals, and you spend your nights in bed with a dead woman. Am I right?"

Hallowell combed through his unruly mop with his fingers. He didn’t answer, so Paul said, "I look at you, and I see what everybody else sees: this highly respected deputy DA who’s got a lock on the next election for county district attorney—"

"Maybe yesterday before court I did."

"Something happened I should know about?"

"Nothing to do with your work."

"But now that I’m getting to know you, I also see you blowing it, living in the past."

"Don’t psychoanalyze me, Paul. I don’t like it."

"Have it your way."

"Let’s get back to Anna."

Paul remembered that Hallowell was his employer, and straightened up. He told him about the flight of the El-Baroukis into Egypt and the conversations with Gates and Mrs. Lauria.

Hallowell said, "He’s out there, and he knows we’re looking. He won’t get away this time."

"Could as easily be a she."

"What about El-Barouki’s description of the man who sold the car?"

"Maybe he made it up on the spot. He wasn’t going to give me any help on the seller at all. I think he already had it in his mind to collect what he could from me, then to go back to the seller and say, ’I’m going to give you up unless you buy me and my entire extended family tickets back to Egypt.’ He knew all along he was just using me to set up a blackmail payment."

"There has to be something in the car. How long do we have to wait for some lab reports?"

"I’ll be talking to Ginger today. I think it’s still too early, though."

"I have to tell you I’m having a hard time believing what you’ve conjured up, all from Kim’s painting. I looked at that picture and saw just meaningless blobs of paint. Let’s hope you’re on to something there. What else can you do to find the seller?"

"Call a friend at the DMV," Paul said. "I don’t know if there could be a way to get a list of every Catalina registered to a Tahoe owner three years ago. The DMVs getting up to speed with its computers now, but three or four years ago—I just don’t know. And other than that, I’ll call all the garages again to see if any of them remember working on a Catalina. It’s hard to believe a big car with fins could be cruising around here for a long time and no mechanic or gas station attendant would have noticed."

"What if you don’t get a line that way?"

"We’ll be deeply embedded in shit, buddy."

Hallowell started rubbing his eyes with his fists like a little kid trying to wake up from a nightmare. He was realizing that the leads were petering out on them, that they might not succeed this time around either. Paul caught a glimpse of the gold band he still wore on his left hand.

Paul thought about what he was going to say next, and decided there was no easy way to put it.

"I have to go back to Carmel tonight," he said. "One week was all I could give you full-time on short notice. I really thought I could break it for you in a week. It could break yet, but ... anyway, I’m not sure when I can get back."

Hallowell said, "Law enforcement lost big when you went out on your own, Paul. Let me know if you ever decide to come back in." He was trying to smile, but the smile turned into something else. "I’ll call Nina," he said.

"Do that. Love is like a gun, you know? Whole lotta power, but you’ve gotta pull the trigger first."

Collier had hardly gone when the hotel clerk called Paul to say he had an urgent message from Ms. Reilly to meet her at a certain address at a place called Happy Homestead. The name suggested a waitress in a gingham apron. Maybe she wanted to have a colleague-and-friend breakfast. He could manage that. He pulled on his shoes, whistling.

Framed by a glorious morning, Nina was waiting for Paul at the address, the main gate of a cemetery, wearing dark glasses and a frown, her voluptuous self sneakily accentuated by the severe cut of her suit. His heart went pit-a-pat at the sight of her and he reminded himself sternly that she was a workaholic, a thick-skinned mouthpiece who had had the audacity to turn down his proposal. She waved and came to meet him when she saw him. Steady now, boy, he thought, they all do that thing with their hips when they walk. Remember the overdeveloped brain in that pretty cranium, that brain that keeps the hormones in check when it ought to be the other way around....

"You came," she said. "I’ve missed you." She rose up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, which commenced to burning as though singed by a flamethrower.

"I had to head this way anyway," he said. "So this is Happy Homestead. What are we doing here? What’s the story with the patrol cars out front?"

"The caretaker got here at seven and noticed the ground in one of the plots had been disturbed. He called his boss and then the police."

"Disturbed?"

"Somebody dug up a grave. The casket’s intact, except ... it’s open. And the body is gone."

"Whoa! Whose body?"

"A man named Ray de Beers."

"Ah. The guy who got struck by lightning the day you and Collier hiked Tallac."

"A lot has happened since then. Paul, I’ve been fighting a motion filed by Ray’s father to exhume the body. We spent the day before yesterday in court haggling."

"Who won the motion?"

"Nobody. In the middle of the argument, my client fell apart and instructed me to drop the opposition, but I managed to get the whole thing postponed instead. Quentin de Beers, Ray’s father, was furious at my maneuver."

"You think de Beers did this?"

"I don’t know what to think. He was about to win, because my client wouldn’t fight anymore. But he might have had to wait a few days for his order. Maybe he thought my client might change her mind again and so he decided to take matters into his own hands. I’m flabbergasted, I truly am. I thought it would be nice to have your cool head."

"Cool-headed colleague, that’s me," Paul said. "Lead on."

They walked down the path together, Nina silent, apparently wrapped up in her thoughts.

"How’s the house-hunting going?" he asked to bring her back. "Find anything that looks good?"

She raised her eyes to his, then dropped them again, as if she enjoyed the contact but needed to keep it brief. "I seem to be looking for the wrong thing. Nothing I see feels right."

"Keep looking," Paul advised. "One day you’ll walk into a place and voila! It’ll sing to you."

"I’m going to wear out poor Mrs. Wendover’s tires. She’s really trying, unlike the realtor I started out with."

They reached the clump of people at Ray de Beers’s grave site. A patrol car had driven right up onto the lawn, the red lights flashing, the radio squawking. "Who’s he?" Paul asked, pointing toward the gesticulating fellow who was helping them.

"The caretaker. They’ve found something," Nina said in a low voice. A few feet from the site, a small group of people had formed, kept from getting any closer to the grave by crime tape and a uniformed patrol officer. They were watching a police forensics technician bag some large tool near the grave site in plastic. On the other side, a photographer from the Mirror competed with a police photographer for the best angles into the pit.

A backhoe had been taped off-limits on the driveway, indicating how the digging had been accomplished. Paul slipped by the group when the patrolman’s back was turned, stood at the edge of the pit, and looked in. Down there he saw a black casket, hinged on the left, yawning open and revealing a stained white satin lining. Soft clods of dirt had fallen or had been knocked in from above.

A man had lain there in what was supposed to be eternal darkness. It should have been raining or foggy or snowing, in keeping with the morbid scene, but this was California. The sun shone down into the pit, illuminating every crevice, pitiless, indecent.

"Creepy, isn’t it?" the elderly man said. "I come to put flowers on my wife’s grave this morning, and this is what I see. Like an episode from Tales of the Crypt. The guy’s been buried alive, right, and he wakes up in the dark, he screams and screams, and then he tries to claw his way out—"

"And it cuts to a commercial," Paul said. "I hate that." Stepping back from the pit, he looked around for Nina, who was talking to a tall, skinny woman with a mane of black hair who had just come up the walk.

"Quentin did this," the woman told Nina.

Nina turned and said, "Paul, I’d like you to meet my client. Sarah de Beers. I was just telling her about you."

At first, the woman paid no attention to Paul. She raked the bushes with hypervigilant eyes as if she thought something lay in wait for her. Finally, she held out frosty fingers, grasped his hand, and released it with a jerk. "I called him. Quentin," she said. "His houseman said he didn’t come home last night." She looked over at the grave site. "I want to see."

Stepping carefully over the fresh earth, she peered into the hole, bloodless hands clenched at her sides. After a few minutes, Nina and Paul joined her silent vigil.

"Are you Mrs. de Beers?" the patrolman said, coming over to them. He opened his leather notepad and said, "This is your husband’s grave?"

"Yes."

"Any idea what happened?"

"Quentin dug him up. He said he would, and now he has."

"Quentin de Beers?" the young patrolman said, sounding intensely interested.

Nina said, "Her father-in-law. The dead man’s father." She seemed to step between her client and the cop without moving a muscle, capturing his attention away from the quaking woman beside her. Paul took Mrs. de Beers’s elbow and steered her a few feet away. While she leaned her head against him, he listened as Nina calmly informed the patrolman about the court case that seemed to have led up to this debacle, and all she knew about Quentin de Beers, whom she had met at least once. The one in charge wrote it all down in a notebook. Finally Nina said, "Is that it? Because Mrs. de Beers needs to go home."

"That’s all for now," he said to Nina, as though she were her own client. "Stay available."

While Nina walked her client back to her car, Paul went over to the lab tech, who was just pulling his gloves off. He closed his case with a snap.

"What was that garden tool you just bagged?" Paul said. "Looked like a shovel."

"Can’t say at this time, sir. Excuse me." Toting the case, he walked rapidly toward the patrol car and loaded it into the back, where the big plastic bag was also being loaded. Paul followed him and had a good look, confirming his idea that the item was a shovel.

"The idea that Ray is out there somewhere wandering around in that blue suit, hating all of us because he’s dead and we’re still alive ..." Mrs. de Beers was saying as Paul caught up. "What’s Quentin doing with him? Why is he torturing us? What have we done to him?"

"Can I drive you home?" Nina asked, concern clouding her usually translucent brown eyes.

"No. That’s not necessary. I’m going straight over to see Leo. I’m sure he’s back from ... well, wherever he was this morning when I called. He’s been angry with me because I—I was going to let Quentin have his way. All Quentin had to do was wait! And the kids will have to hear about all this. They’ve been angry at me too, for the same reason. I guess I’ll try to get them all over to the house this afternoon."

"By the way, Sarah. I stopped by your house briefly last night but no one answered the doorbell."

"Molly felt better. I thought it would be all right to leave her for a few minutes. I went for a drive. I—I didn’t get back until very late."

"Molly went out too? By herself? Is that a good idea?"

"Oh, no! She wasn’t planning to go anywhere. She probably just didn’t feel like answering the door. The doctor started her on antidepressants yesterday. Those things wipe you out." She fiddled in a small red leather bag, eventually locating what she was hunting for, a silver key ring forming twin linking circles around the letters M and J.

"I know it’s a bad time to ask a lot of questions, and I won’t, but I need to know one thing," said Nina. "Why did you call me at court and instruct me to drop your opposition to Ray’s exhumation? Maybe it’s a bad time to talk about it, but you didn’t call me back yesterday either."