The Arraignment (24 page)

“How?”

“The person wasn’t that careful taking the checks out of Nick’s drawer,” I tell her.

Her eyes get big. This shuts her up.

“Then comes the hard part. They have to make a decision.”

She’s waiting, anxiously.

“One, they could take the money out of whatever source of funds this person might have. Say for example, some lucrative insurance settlement. You know, try to sweep the whole thing under the carpet. Avoid the embarrassment to the firm. That is, if they can move fast enough to keep the State Bar from turning it into an open investigation.”

I can almost see her eyes do a little nod on this one, the corners of her mouth turning up just a little in approval.

“Or, number two, they could turn the checks over to the district attorney’s office, file charges for forgery and theft, and leave it in the D.A.’s hands. Now that, that last one
is the cleaner course of action. It’s the one any good lawyer would probably recommend. That’s the one that doesn’t get them in any trouble with the bar. They just lose a little public face, some P.R.”

Corners of her mouth down again.

“Of course, with all those suspicious little minds and nothing else to do down at the police department, it wouldn’t surprise me to see an epidemic of paranoia sweep through the place if the D.A. were to get his hands on those checks, depending, that is, on who signed them.

“In which case, I suppose we might have to show a little understanding for those with wayward minds who might be misled into thinking that you had a reason for wanting Nick to die a sudden death.

“I mean, what with all those checks bearing Nick’s name in somebody else’s signature, the full-court press on the insurance company for a couple of million, and you riding around town next to Dudley out there, the two of you with the top down sitting on jaguar pelts. I mean you have to admit, it does beat grieving.”

“You make it sound so . . .” she searches for the word.

“Tawdry?” I say.

“Selfish,” she says.

“That’s a good word. I mean not good, but, well, I think you understand what I mean. So. Now.” I lift the other cheek onto my desk so that I’m sitting completely on it, my feet dangling a few inches above the floor directly in front of her. “Before I have to call Adam Tolt back and talk to him about which direction the firm might want to go, why don’t you tell me what it was that Nathan didn’t want you to mention when I was standing outside the door?”

She sits there wide-eyed, considering her options: door number one, carpet sweeping; door number two, some serious felonies for forgery and theft with some probable time, and some good points toward motivation on a double murder. Her response, which takes a nanosecond, tells me this is not a hard choice.

“We had been seeing each other,” she says, “for some time. Nathan and I.”

“I am stunned.”

“I mean before Nick died.”

“You mean before he was shot, killed?” I say. “There is a difference.”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.” She corrects herself.

“If Nick died of pneumonia in a hospital with Metz in the bed next to him, the police wouldn’t be looking under every rock for the people who shot them. They’d just figure God did it, and you’d be free to hold hands with Nathan as if nothing happened. You do see the difference?”

She looks at me with a bitter expression. “We didn’t tell the police about it. We didn’t think they needed to know. It was private.”

“And now you’re worried they’ll find out,” I finish the thought for her.

She nods.

“How? The two of you having been so discreet?” I say.

“Oh, stop it,” she says.

“No. I mean it. Nathan’s an expert on discretion. He even has the word printed on his business card.”

She doesn’t like this, looking at me through mean little slits. “Even you have to understand,” she says. “My marriage with Nick was over six months before he was shot.” Now that she’s angry, she doesn’t seem to have any difficulty saying the word. “He retained bragging rights, that was all. And he used them with his friends constantly. You should know. You were one of them,” she says.

“Hey. He never kissed and told with me.”

“All the same, it was an empty marriage. He knew it and I knew it.”

“Then why didn’t you divorce him? Or did you find an easier way of dealing with the problem?”

“You can’t seriously believe that I killed him or that I had anything to do with it?” Now that she wants something, my feckless acceptance of her denial, Dana’s eyes go all soft
again and teary. She is able to turn this on faster than most kids can shoot a squirt gun.

“No. It’s not your style,” I tell her.

She smiles. There is palpable relief as the hard set of her chin goes smooth and round again.

“You’d probably use poison or a knife,” I tell her. “But I can’t be sure about Nathan. After all, he is fond of fast cars, and whoever shot Nick left a lot of rubber on the street.”

“We had nothing to do with it,” she says. “You have to believe me.”

“So now it’s we? You can vouch for Nathan?”

“He didn’t do it. He couldn’t do something like that.”

“You shouldn’t sell yourself short,” I tell her. “Underestimating your attraction to men like that. It doesn’t become you.”

She should be angry, but instead another instinct takes hold. Looking up at me, she moistens her lips with her tongue.

“You don’t believe me. What can I do to make you believe me?” she says. She’s going all soft and feminine now, getting dangerous, trying to find her poison gland.

“It’s probably not you,” I tell her. “It’s just the cynic in me. I sometimes have trouble accepting that the earth is round too. But I get over it. Still, let’s get back to my initial question. If you didn’t love Nick, why didn’t you divorce him?”

“I don’t know. I probably would have if I’d found the right man,” she says.

“So Nathan wasn’t the right man, is that it?”

“Oh, I like Nathan,” she says. What she means is until someone better comes along. “I mean . . . he’s very serious. I really don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want him to know about the checks.”

“Yes. I can imagine how that might cause him to have some second thoughts on the relationship. I suppose he’d at least want to lock up his checkbook and credit cards in the vault at night.”

“Neither of us had anything to do with Nick’s death. You
have to understand I was desperate,” she says. “Nick left me three months behind on the house mortgage. I don’t know where all the money was going. All I know is I wasn’t seeing any of it. The bank was threatening to take the car away. He wasn’t coming home half the time at night. We were hardly talking. I think he knew about Nathan. But he didn’t seem to care. Something else was going on,” she says. “Maybe he had somebody else. I don’t know.”

“He didn’t tell you anything about it?”

She shakes her head.

I slide off the edge of the desk onto my feet and walk around to the other side, settle into my chair, and scratch my chin, thinking. I sit there for a long time, maybe a minute, saying nothing, just looking at the wall under the row of licenses.

To Dana this must seem like a year, just sitting there sweating.

“What are you going to do about the checks?” She finally breaks the silence.

“Well.” I take a deep sigh. “It looks like you’re going to come up a little short on your end of the settlement,” I tell her.

“Yes. I know. Fifty-seven thousand dollars,” she says.

“No. It’s going to be a little more than that.” I walk her through the settlement terms, the fact that Margaret is getting two million on the deal or she’s going to walk. In which case the entire settlement goes away, and Dana has an ugly conversation with the D.A. over some bad checks and probably much more.

I break the news to her that Harry and I won’t be compromising our fees for representing her in the settlement. This will be a full third of whatever she gets, including the fifty-seven thousand she has to pay back to Tolt’s firm.

Through all of this, she sits listening. She doesn’t argue. Just your average block of ice as she calculates what is left to take home after being ravaged by lawyers. She doesn’t like it, but Dana doesn’t have a lot of choices.

“Is that it?” she says.

“Assuming Tolt hasn’t changed his mind and the State Bar hasn’t descended on his office.”

She snatches her purse and the little tennis hat from the floor in front of her, gets up out of the chair, and turns to leave. Her little white fanny sashaying away.

“There is one more thing,” I say.

“What?” She turns, standing halfway between my desk and the door. To Dana, she’s now paid the price for the luxury of a derisive look, her expression filled with scorn as she eyes me, one hand on her hip above her golden thighs.

“Do you know who Grace Gimble is?” I ask.

“Who?”

“Grace Gimble?”

“One of Nick’s lovers, I suppose?”

“You tell me,” I say.

“I’ve never heard of her.”

“What about Jamaile Enterprises?”

She shakes her head, dismissive now. “You asked me about that once before,” she says. “I told you I never heard of it. Can I leave now?”

“Just one more question, in case the cops ask me. What did you tell them about Nathan? Did they ask you about him?”

“No. Not by name,” she says. “They just asked the general questions. How was my marriage to Nick? Were we happy? What was I supposed to tell them?”

“You might have tried the truth.”

“Oh yeah. My husband and I were barely talking. He wasn’t supporting me. I was seeing someone else. I don’t know who he was seeing because he wasn’t coming home nights. Oh, and by the way, he was worth more to me dead than he was alive. Great legal advice,” she says.

She has a point.

I
t is late June and from all accounts the cops are no closer to finding out who shot Nick than they were two months ago. The double murder has all the signs of an investigation going nowhere.

I pull into the parking lot on Harbor Boulevard and find an empty visitor’s space. Zane Tresler’s county office is located on the top floor of the Hall of Administration, a Spanish art deco tower facing the bay.

I clear security on the ground floor and take the elevator up to the executive suites. At the far end of the marble corridor is a set of double doors, translucent etched glass framed in mahogany, the name Z
ANE
T
RESLER
stenciled in gold letters across the glass. Tresler represents District 5, and Adam was right, he is now chairman of the board.

I jerk the heavy door open and walk in. Reception is its own museum. A floor-to-ceiling display case is situated in the center of the room like a pillar of ice. Inside are artifacts of an earlier civilization. If I had to guess, I would say Central or South American. They contain pieces of ancient
pottery arrayed on shelves around a large stone tablet, covered in white plaster with figures etched into it. The printed card next to it reads:

S
IXTH
C
ENTURY
M
AYAN
S
TELA

This magnificently preserved Mayan tablet, covered in limestone plaster and etched with hieroglyphs, is an ancient document and form of written expression used by Mayan scribes to record important events or religious ceremonies. The stela presented here was discovered in 1932 near the ruins of Tulúm on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. It is believed to have been transported from an even earlier site somewhere in Central Southern Mexico.

My appointment with Tresler is for ten. I am a couple of minutes early. I step around the display case and hand my card to the young woman sitting behind the counter.

She picks up the phone and sends my name back, listens for a second, then hangs up.

“Someone will be out to get you in a moment,” she says.

I turn to check the display on this side, behind me. Here there are pieces of pottery, dishes and a jug, some with hairline cracks probably dating back to the time of Moses. The card typed in neat print next to them says: T
OLTEC
: T
ENTH
C
ENTURY
. I’m wrong. Before I can read further, I am paged from behind.

“Mr. Madriani?”

When I turn, a young man is standing in front of me.

“Hi. I’m Arnie Mack, one of Supervisor Tresler’s A.A.s.” He shakes my hand under a guileless grin.

“The man has quite a display,” I tell him.

“Yeah. One of the supervisor’s passions. He’s really into archeology and history. He’s working to fund a museum for the area.”

“Yes. I’d heard that.”

“If you follow me, I’ll take you back.” He leads me past reception, a guarded door that leads to the inner sanctum.

We arrive at another centered set of double translucent doors, each etched with gold lettering across them.

Z
ANE
T
RESLER
C
HAIRMAN OF THE
B
OARD OF
S
UPERVISORS

When the kid opens the door, there is a kind of musty odor. It’s a familiar smell that seems to linger in government buildings dating to the depression, the WPA of the 1930s. I have often equated this damp scent with the smell of power.

He takes a few tentative steps into the cavernous office. “Excuse me, sir.”

“What?”

“Your ten o’clock is here.”

“Well, let him in.”

“He’s here.”

Seated behind a desk twenty feet away is a bald figure, wrinkles climbing up his pale forehead, ending only as they begin to traverse the crown of his head. This seems aimed at me, like a well-polished bullet, as Tresler’s attention is focused down on a prodigious pile of papers centered on the leather blotter in front of him, the only items on top of an otherwise clean desk.

He seems to possess the attentive powers of a mystic, as he neither moves nor looks up, as our shoes click and shuffle against the hard marble on our way to his desk.

Slight of build, Tresler is not what you would expect of someone possessing an estate in the billions and holding the reigns to a political dynasty, even if it’s just a local one. He is wearing a short-sleeved rayon white shirt, buttoned right up to the throat, with one of those string ties that were popular in the fifties, this one sporting a sizable piece of blue-green turquoise in a silver setting just below his Adam’s apple. If I didn’t know better, I might expect him to get out the banjo and guitar any second. His nose is almost touching the papers as he reads.