Silent Witness (40 page)

There was no point in lying. ‘Yes,' Tony answered. ‘But so will any lawyer, until he shuts it off.'

For the first time, Sam's voice rose. ‘You're not
any
lawyer, Tony. I'll be better off not watching you at trial, wondering if I'm capable of murder –'

‘You're right,' Tony heard himself snap. ‘I'm not any lawyer. I'm much, much better, and you're going to need every fucking bit of that.'

Sam's eyes widened, and then he smiled, perhaps in surprise at Tony's burst of ego and arrogance, surprising to Tony himself. ‘Still a competitor,' he said softly. ‘Aren't you?'

Tony stared at him. ‘I'm not a whole different person, Sam. And neither are you.'

Sam's smile faded. ‘That's what I've been saying, pal. Before you leave this place, I just wish you'd believe it.'

Tony exhaled. ‘There's something else I have to tell you,' he said at last. ‘We have an offer from Stella Marz.'

Sam's eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘What is it?'

‘She may be willing to consider manslaughter. But only if you can persuade her that you acted out of some reflex, not meaning to kill Marcie Calder. Which requires a public confession, in open court.'

‘
Lie
, you mean.' Sam stood abruptly, voice taut. ‘I won't fucking plead to this. I'm going to lose my house, my career, my kids' respect, and maybe my marriage. All I've got left is that I'm innocent. I'm not going to barter that to get a lighter sentence. I'm not going to
lie
to get it.' His jaw worked. ‘I'm going to fight this, and I'm going to win. And then I'm going to give Sue the best life I can possibly give her, try to make up for all the damage I've done. After I'm found innocent, maybe she can believe somehow that our life is worth another try.'

Sitting in the grass, Tony looked up at him. ‘You'd be risking life in prison, Sam.'

‘Take your deal, Tony, and I'd be risking more than that.' His voice hardened. ‘We're
not
that different. You still need to win, and I still need my self-respect. But this time it's not your call.'

Tony stood to face him. ‘It's not my deal, either. And if it were my call, I couldn't take it. No matter how bad this looks for you, there's a chance a jury would believe that someone else killed Marcie Calder, or that she wasn't murdered at all. Cases like this need defending, which is why Saul Ravin defended me. That's what I told Stella Marz.'

Sam gazed at him, quiet now. There were tears in his eyes; seeing this, Tony knew how much Sam needed the slightest sign that Tony might believe him innocent. But he did not know what to say or do.

Silent, Sam extended his hand. It was an oddly formal gesture, perhaps a goodbye, and it reached a pool of feeling within Tony much deeper than the present. And then Tony remembered when they were eighteen, and had said goodbye by shaking hands.

Instead of shaking Sam's hand, Tony embraced him.

All at once, Tony felt Sam's arms envelop him, holding him tight. Softly, Sam said, ‘Maybe we can fix this, Tony. Maybe we can.'

Alison Taylor froze, caught in the light from her parents' back porch, black hair swirling around her face. Her eyes widened in surprise, and then the purse dropped from her hand.

‘
Why?
' she asked.

In this, what surely must be the last moment of her life, she seemed so vulnerable that it was heartbreaking. Tears welled in her eyes. Her bare legs could not seem to move.

‘
Please
.' Her voice was husky with knowledge of his betrayal. ‘Please, don't do this to me again –'

Tony bolted upright, awakening from his dream.

There was sweat on his forehead. He stared at the room around him, heart pounding. Piece by piece, the knowledge of who and where he was came back to him: forty-six, a lawyer, the husband of Stacey and father of Christopher, alone in a motel room in the hometown of his youth, returned to protect Sam Robb from the charge of murdering a girl who, from her pictures, had looked something like Alison Taylor. After telling Sam that Marcie Calder had been pregnant with his child, Tony had returned to the refuge of this room and fallen into exhausted sleep; from the edges of the curtains, pale with blocked sunlight, he saw that not too much time had passed. His watch read seven-thirty.

Alison Taylor had been dead for twenty-eight years.

Tony ran his hand across his face and realized that it was trembling.

In that twenty-eight years, his only dream of Alison had been as the dead girl he had found, her face distorted by pain and horror. Now she was alive, accusing, and yet in this dream, unlike the others, he had no sense of his own presence, except as the eye of a camera. Throughout the dream, the camera seemed to move closer: in the last instant, her face – the pale skin, the high cheekbones, the wrenching look of fear – had seemed close enough to touch.

A shiver ran through him.

In his seventeenth year, Tony Lord had learned that to push aside his feelings, focusing on the task at hand, was the price of his survival. Later, it became the price of his survival as a lawyer. Yet he had never doubted that this left a residue in the well of his subconscious, the corners of his conscience, those places where he kept feelings so inconvenient that it had taken years for his own wife, his best friend, to realize that they existed at all. Sometimes the price he paid was dreams.

He was too honest with himself to pretend that
this
dream meant nothing. But that Marcie Calder's death was a haunting echo of Alison's, at least for him, was something so apparent that it hardly required a dream to surface his warring sympathies, his profound ambivalence about representing Sam. Especially a dream that, moments later, still coursed through him like a fever.

He got up, went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face. When he collected himself, he would call home. Christopher's baseball game would be over; their conversation, a father getting the news from his son, would reestablish contact with the normal. Then he would talk over with Stacey what he should do about Sam and, if he felt up to it, his dream. He wondered what it meant that part of him feared to mention it. . . .

The telephone rang.

Perhaps it was her, Tony thought. Right now, he needed it to be.

‘Hello.'

‘Tony?' Sue's voice was muffled, drained. ‘He's told me everything. I really need to talk to you, I think.' She paused a moment, and her voice became tentative, as if she were no longer sure of anything. ‘Is that okay?'

She sounded as lonely and confused as he, Tony thought, but with far better reason. ‘Of course it is,' he answered. ‘For you, it'll always be okay.'

On his way to meet her, Tony mustered the rigor to confront what her call might mean: that Sue knew, or had learned, something that pointed to Sam's guilt, and now could not withhold this in good conscience.

She wanted to have a private dinner, Sue had told him; she could not stand staying in their house, and whatever their embarrassment now, the shame that would commence tomorrow – the humiliated wife, the assistant principal who had first impregnated, then perhaps murdered, a girl who had trusted him – would make going out impossible. In some distant way, it reminded Tony of the night that Sam had gotten drunk, leaving Tony as the person Sue relied on; perhaps, for a moment, had loved the most. As he pulled into the driveway of the Lake City Country Club, the echo of that night grew stronger.

It was three hours or so since Sam had told her. Tony found it hard to imagine how Sue felt now.

Pulling up in front, Tony got out and handed his keys to the valet. For a moment, he stood there, gazing at the grounds and building, part of him dreading his meeting with Sue, another part remembering that evening twenty-eight years earlier when it had seemed possible to him, were they ever to visit this place again, that it would be as a couple.

It was strange, slipping back in time like this, viewed through the prism of Marcie Calder's death. Yet the club itself maintained the same placid facade: a rambling white wooden structure from the 1920s, the manicured grass of the eighteenth hole fading in the dusk. This illusion of security and permanence, Tony supposed, was part of the allure for the worthies of Lake City, offering them the insular sense of being where it mattered to be. Though it had been many years since Tony had aspired to belong here, or envied those who did, the sense of being excluded came back to him, surprising in its power. Perhaps Dee Nixon was right, he thought: in some crevice of our souls, we are always seventeen. The thought of her, then Ernie, unsettled him even more.

Taking a last look around him, Tony went inside.

The hostess, a plump, friendly blonde with a run in her stocking, took Tony to the dining room. It was where Sue and he had danced that night, but with, he discovered, one unpleasant difference – the same malign fate that seemed to have designed this day had ordained that, tonight, John and Katherine Taylor would be dining here.

Dabbing his mouth with a white napkin, John Taylor saw the hostess leading Tony through the tables. He became as still as his daughter had been in Tony's first dream; only his eyes, filling with shock and resentment, betrayed his offense that now there was no refuge from the affront that was Tony Lord. Though his own heart felt like a trip-hammer, Tony merely nodded, a picture of indifference on the way to dinner with a friend. He hoped that Alison's mother would not see him.

‘This way,' the hostess said. ‘Mrs. Robb's expecting you.'

Sue sat at a corner table, a double Scotch already placed in front of her. The surest sign of what the years had brought to her was in her eyes; they seemed wounded, as though she had been forced to stare too long into a harsh light. The extra makeup beneath her eyes did not conceal that she had wept when Sam told her: it was perverse, Tony thought, to feel that pain had made her beautiful. He touched her arm before either of them spoke.

She gazed at his fingertips. ‘Well,' she said softly, ‘here we are.'

He did not need to say how sorry he was, to say anything at all.

‘What are you going to do?' she asked.

‘I don't know.' His eyes met hers. ‘And you?'

She shook her head. ‘It's too new. Even though I've known, really, ever since she died, I can
see
them together now.' Slowly, she looked up at him. ‘My God, Tony – a baby . . .'

Her eyes welled with tears. The fear that she would tell him something damning dissipated. In her disbelief, he guessed, she would rather be with Tony than alone. He had been there all those years ago, when their three lives were shaped.

‘I thought he'd changed,' she murmured. ‘I told myself that once we married, the restlessness would leave him. It's the oldest hope in the world, I think, and it's always the woman's.' She gazed at Tony with sad candor. ‘When I married him, part of me still loved you, Tony – I guess that never really stopped. Maybe he's always known that.'

You should have taken her away
, Sam had said.
After Alison died, all those years ago
. Softly, Tony asked, ‘Why did you marry him?'

‘I loved him too, in a different way. I knew I wasn't right for you, that I couldn't be the person you were going to need. But I was sure I was who
Sam
needed.' She gave Tony a melancholy smile. ‘I was half right, wasn't I? You found the woman you needed. He found more teenage girls.'

Tony's hand circled her wrist. ‘In the end, Sue, you can't fix people. If anyone could, it's you.'

She looked down. ‘That poor, pathetic girl,' she said at length. ‘I imagine her foolish notion of who Sam is, then remember that she's dead. So I can't even be angry at her. It's much, much worse than that. Because I can't be sure that he . . .' Her eyes shut. ‘How can I be? I thought I knew what our marriage was – with whatever faults, who
he
was. But I didn't, and I'm not a fool. He lied to me too well.'

It was the same doubt that haunted Tony. But hearing it from Sue was infinitely worse: if Sam could deceive her, he was capable of fooling anyone, whether Tony or a jury. And the damage Sam had done to her, an open wound, was more terrible than any damage Tony could imagine to himself. There was nothing he could do but be with her.

In their silence, a waiter came, tentative and respectful. There were no secrets in Lake City, and no further harm for Sue was possible; ordering his own martini, Tony did not bother to remove his fingers from her wrist. When he glanced around them, he saw that the Taylors were gone.

She followed his gaze. ‘Alison's parents were here,' she said. ‘Did you speak?'

‘That's impossible. So all I did was nod, as if it were nothing, and wish for the thousandth time this week that we'd been with you and Sam that night. Instead of going off alone.'

To his surprise, tears came to her eyes again. ‘So do I, Tony. Not just for Alison. Sometimes I think all of our lives would have been so different.'

He left his hand where it was. Softly, he answered, ‘But then I wouldn't be a lawyer, would I?'

Sue looked up. With equal quiet, she asked, ‘Do you think Sam killed Marcie Calder?'

Once more, their eyes met. ‘There's only so much I can say, Sue. But if I knew Sam was guilty of murder, I'd be back in San Francisco, as far from Lake City as I could get. For whatever it's worth to you, I'm still here.'

Silent, Sue gazed at her Scotch; she had hardly touched it, Tony realized. ‘He's going to trial,' she said.

‘Yes.'

For a moment, her throat worked. ‘Will I have to testify?'