The Big Exit (10 page)

They live just a few miles apart; she in Palo Alto, he in an area of Menlo Park called Stanford Hills, which is just off Sand
Hill Road, very close to where Forman killed the SLAC researcher with his car. Cogan’s house is a little bigger and sits on
a bit more land, but it arguably isn’t as charming (she had a three-bedroom cottage, he a four-bedroom ranch).

They’d talked about moving in together and had even had a three-month-long cohabitation trial, with the understanding that
if things progressed they’d sell both houses and get a larger one. But things didn’t progress. A series of niggling arguments
(mainly over his interactions with other women) mushroomed into something more menacing and destructive. She felt like she’d
pulled out of the parking lot one day and instead of encountering the usual speed bump, she’d run over a set of severe-tire-damage
“Tiger Teeth.” It got ugly.

Then she started drinking. Heavily.

“I’ve got to get showered and dressed,” she tells him now. “I’ve gotta deal with the press and my asshole partners, not to
mention my client.”

“This is a big deal, right? When was the last time something this big happened around here?”

“You,” she says. “That was big.”

“No, I mean a murder like this.”

“A while.”

“Are you really having a kid on your own, Carolyn?”

“I am, Ted. Trying anyway. I’m doing a cycle right now.”

She wonders who’d told him, though she didn’t really care. She’d
informed enough people to ensure he’d hear about it. It had actually taken several days longer for the news to reach him than
she’d anticipated. Funny how people could be more discreet when you were open with something and totally indiscreet when you
requested they keep it a secret.

“Who’s the donor?” he asks.

“I don’t know. But he seems good on paper.”

“ADI, huh?” Anonymous donor insemination. She’d heard the term, of course, but didn’t know he had. “So, you’re really going
to do this?”

“I told you I was going to.”

He shakes his head disapprovingly.

“If you want in, Ted, you’ve got a week,” she warns.

“I’ve got shitty genes, Carolyn. I told you that.”

She laughs. It still strikes her as comical for someone who looks like George Clooney to stand there and tell you he has shitty
genetics. But Cogan, who’s been married before to a woman who left him for her suddenly rich ex-boyfriend, is a doctor, and
Alzheimer’s runs in his family. On top of that, his father died relatively young of cancer. So, he does have something to
worry about. But the way she sees it he’s simply come up with a clinical excuse for birth control.

“The only bad gene you’ve got is an anti-Dad gene,” she says.

“You know, I think about her sometimes.”

“Who?”

“Kristen.”

Kristen is his former patient, the girl who died. He rarely, if ever, speaks about her. Carolyn had told him to get some counseling
after everything that went down, but he’d shrugged off her suggestions. He’d done a rotation in psych, he explained to her,
and didn’t think much of the discipline, which had become much more about changing people’s outlooks and demeanor through
drugs rather than through conversation. Like a few other doctors she knew, Cogan was good at dispensing his own medical opinion
but not so good at accepting others’.

“What do you think about?” she asks.

“Just what happened, why she would have done that to herself. How irrational it really was and how I could have prevented
it. And
then I think about all the bad things that can happen to kids. I see it every day in the hospital, Carolyn. Have you ever
had to tell a parent their kid has died in a car accident?”

No, she hasn’t.

“So is it the genetics or just a dour outlook?” she asks. “Or is it just me? Or all of the above?”

“It’s not you,” he says.

“Then what is it, Ted? We’ve been through this over and over. Why are you here? You said you were out.”

“I did.”

“So?”

“I heard. It bothered me. So I’m here. And now I’m fucking cold.”

“I gotta go, Ted.”

“How are you doing with the shots?”

“Shitty.”

“I thought so. And you’re going to continue even with all this going on? Those fertility drugs can make you a little wiggy,
you know?”

“Tell me about it,” she says. “I just told some asshole tech blogger to go fuck himself. Probably not a good idea. But it
could be over tomorrow. They might find the killer. Or if Hill really gets charged, someone’s going to tell her to get some
big-name attorney. I’ve done two murder cases as a defense attorney, three as a prosecutor.”

“Well, let me know if I can help with anything.”

“I will.”

“Hang in there, okay? This is good, Carolyn. This is really good for you. I’m happy for you.”

She doesn’t know whether he means the case or the kid but suspects the former.

“Go home, Ted. You’re not making sense anymore.”

O
UTSIDE THE HOLDING CELL ON THE LOWER FLOOR OF THE
M
ENLO
Park police station, a sign affixed to the wall reads, “It is a felony to possess or to bring into this jail any narcotic
or paraphernalia, alcoholic beverage, firearm, tear gas or explosives. Violators will be imprisoned for up to four years in
a state prison. Sections 4573 & 4574 California Penal Code.”

Purposely slurring his words, Richie reads the sign aloud as Madden stands behind him, unlocking the handcuffs his partner
clamped on Richie’s wrists earlier. “You
guyz
is a bunch of party poopers,” he says after he finishes reading. “How do you expect to have any fun around here?”

The truth is, it isn’t much of a jail. The room they put him in feels more like a small, austere, windowless office, with
its cement floor painted gray and cinder-block walls painted white. Integrated into the wall on one side of the room is a
sort of bench or shelf made out of a Formica-like material that has child-friendly rounded corners. On top of the bench is
a bed mat the color of green hospital scrubs. The mat’s only a couple of inches thick and not as comfortable as the futon
couch he sleeps on up in the city, but at least it has some padding.

The station is nicer than he remembers from his one other visit years ago. He realizes why: it’s new. During his trial, he’d
heard people talking about redoing the station and the civic center, and now the project is completed.

“If you need to go to the bathroom, knock on the door,” Madden says.

Back at the View, before they’d arrested him, he’d downed another whisky—a double—and made his last substantive comments before
he stopped talking. “Someone was putting the heat on Mark,” he said. “They wanted some dough. I think he thought it was me.
He sent over some muscle to send a message. I reported it to the SFPD. That’s all I gotta say. This nonsense, I got nothin’
to do with. I didn’t kill nobody.”

Not long after that Madden took a call and stepped away from the table. He was gone awhile. A good ten minutes. When he came
back, the place was getting ready to close. He said:

“Good news, Richie. The judge just issued a warrant to search your apartment. You want to come along?”

He rode back with them to his apartment and waited outside while they snapped some pictures and searched it. About forty-five
minutes later, Madden and Billings came out with some of his belongings sealed in plain paper evidence bags, which got his
heart racing more than it already had been.

What the hell did they take? The diving knives? My laptop?

“What you got there?” he asked Billings, who was in the process of lifting the hatch to the trunk of Madden’s SUV.

“You’ll know soon enough. You got a lawyer?”

“He’s dead.”

“You want us to get you a lawyer? You need some numbers?”

He shook his head, the gravity of what was happening finally sinking in. He’d already texted Ashley three times, asking her
for help. “They got a warrant,” he wrote. “Searching apartment now.”

“Don’t say anything,” she wrote back. “Keep your mouth shut, whatever you do.”

Too late. Now he was fucked. They were going to arrest him. And to make matters worse, they were getting cocky about it. Which
could mean one of two things. They either thought they had him nailed or they thought they almost had him nailed but were
missing the hammer and were hoping he’d give it to them.

His original lawyer, Max Fischer, actually had died, but he could have called the attorney from the firm, a woman named Gail
Stevens who’d represented him at his parole-board hearing. The only problem was he couldn’t afford her. And more than getting
charged, the
thought of how he was going to pay for decent representation was what was really weighing on him. He might as well have been
walking gravely injured into an emergency room without insurance. He’d be in debt for years. If his father were alive, he
would have called him, because his father wouldn’t forgive him if he didn’t. But he’d already cost his family so much the
first go-around, he couldn’t bear the thought of making the call to his mother. She’d be devastated. He just couldn’t. He
asked Ashley to speak to Lourdes. He’d seen that guy Krisberg in the office. Maybe he’d cut him a deal.

“When do I get a call?” he asked.

“Face the vehicle,” Billings said, taking him by the arm and gently turning him. “You’ll get your call when you get to the
station house. But looks like you’ve been texting your head off. Who you talking to?”

Richie was sober enough to know that in some ways they actually didn’t mind him texting. It would later give them a record
of whom he’d contacted and what he’d said. And all too often people made incriminating statements in texts.

“A friend,” he murmured as Billings cuffed him.

That was how it went down. In the car ride down, he kept hoping he’d drunk enough to keep them from questioning him right
away. Sure enough, when they got to the station house, they allowed him to go to the bathroom and make a call (he spoke to
Ashley), then left him in the holding cell.

Richie sat on the bench for a few minutes, waiting for someone to return, but no one did. Madden hadn’t said anything but
Richie knew they needed him completely sober. Taint the beginning, you taint the end, he thinks now, lying down on the bench,
reminded of something a lawyer had once told him. He likes the sound of that.
Tainted beginnings, tainted ends
. And then for some reason he remembers a book he’d read in his high-school advanced-placement English class.
The Painted Bird
, by Jerzy Kosinski. A goddamn holocaust novel. Perfect.

Tainted beginnings, tainted ends
, he repeats to himself over and over, finally falling asleep.

They wake him at seven thirty. A younger, clean-cut cop with short blond hair who looks like he lifeguards on the weekends
gives him a towel and a cheap travel toiletry kit that reminds him of something
you’d get on an airplane when you fly overseas coach class. He tells Richie to get his shoes on. He can brush his teeth and
wash his face if he wants.

After he’s through in the bathroom, two more uniformed cops lead him into an interrogation room. It looks very similar to
the “cell” he’d slept in but is about twice as large and has a rectangular gray institutional-looking table in the middle
of it with a single chair on one side of the table and two chairs on the other. There’s a window on the wall across from the
single chair. He can’t see out the window but assumes whoever is on the other side can see into the room.

They make him wait in the room by himself for almost ten minutes. Then Madden enters, trailed by a tall, thin black guy Richie
vaguely remembers. Short-cropped afro, pleasant eyes and a strong, angular jaw. Would be better-looking except his face has
pockmarks on his cheeks and neck from cystic acne.

“Good morning, Mr. Forman,” Madden says. “This is Detective Burns. I believe you’ve met before.”

“Déjà vu,” Richie says.

They’d brought breakfast. Madden puts a cup of coffee down in front of him along with a bag that he says contains a bagel
and cream cheese, a banana, and a bottle of water.

“If you’ve got any special requests, we’ll see what we can do,” Madden says accommodatingly.

Richie rubs his eyes. His contacts are bothering him a little.

“How ’bout some contact-lens solution?” he asks. “My peepers are starting to bark like hell.”

“Fair enough.”

“And a newspaper wouldn’t be bad. I like to read the sports section in the morning, you know.”

“We switched to iPads,” Madden says without missing a beat. “Since we got the new digs, there’s been a push to go green. We’re
running a little experiment. Going as paperless as possible.”

“For real? All you guys got iPads?”

“Not everybody. We got ten. Corporate donation.”

“Nice. And I heard Facebook has taken over the old Sun campus over by the 101. That’s gotta feel pretty good. Little civic
pride.”

Madden shrugs. He’s hard to read. “City’s happy,” he says. “Free
publicity. And they’ll probably get some concessions down the road. Who knows, maybe Belle Haven gets a new community center.
But I’m not sure what it really does except make it more expensive to buy a home here after they go public. They’re on the
other side of 101, basically off on their own. They’re building it out. Meals in-house, all that fun stuff.”

“Kind of a self-contained little utopia,” Burns comments. “I wouldn’t leave. Ever. They should have a free senior center and
crematorium on campus.”

Richie takes the bagel out of the bag and inspects it. It’s plain and passably soft. He then pulls the top off the coffee
and takes a look.

“Milk and one sugar,” Madden says.

“You remembered.”

“I’ve got a good memory.”

They let him eat for a bit before they finally get down to business.

“You understand the seriousness of the situation you’re in, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“We just want to make that clear, Mr. Forman,” Burns adds. “And we’re going Mirandize you now. I’m going to read you your
rights and then have you sign a Miranda waiver. You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to answer any questions without
a lawyer present. Do you want to make another call?”

Richie takes a sip of the coffee, doing his best to appear nonplussed.

“I’m good for now. Go ahead. I’ll be grading on elocution. No pressure.”

Burns, who’s got more of a sense of humor than Richie first thought, cracks a smile. He then reads him his rights slowly and
deliberately, enunciating each word. “How was that?” he asks when he’s through.

“A for effort,” Richie says.

If Madden’s getting impatient with his shenanigans, he doesn’t show it. He lets him have another bite of his bagel, then makes
him read the top of the form aloud and sign it at the bottom. After he signs, Madden says, “We’re going to ask you some questions
now.”

“Shouldn’t we do a sound check first?”

Madden looks at Burns, then back at Richie. Before either of them can respond, Richie says:

“Those pictures of the Tongans, the ones in my laptop case, you find ’em?”

Madden nods. “We did.”

“You seen either of those mugs before?”

“We’ve got them up on the wire,” Burns says. “The SFPD said they didn’t turn up anything.”

Madden: “So, you really think someone was trying to blackmail Mr. McGregor?”

“Looked that way.”

“And you had no part in that? You didn’t say to one of your old buddies from prison, hey, I’ve got an easy mark, you just
have to put the screws in a little and we can pick up some fast cash.”

He laughs. Not a defiant snort, a real chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” Madden asks.

“Just the way you said it, like they were guys I’d gone to school with or something. You know, college buds you meet up with
at a reunion and knock back a couple of cold ones, talk about the good ol’ days raping and ripping people off.”

“You were in there awhile,” Burns says. “You had friends. Anybody you close to out now? You talk to anyone?”

He shakes his head, a touch of sadness coming into his eyes.

“You sure about that?” Burns says a little more aggressively. “I noticed a little tentativeness there.”

“No,” he says firmly.

Madden: “You wanna give us some names, so we can check on their status?”

“You remember this guy Dr. Jaron? Dr. Ben Jaron?”

“The anesthesiologist?” Madden says.

“Yeah, him.”

“Man, I haven’t heard that name in a while. You remember him, Burns?”

Burns remembers.

“Well, he’s still locked up,” Richie says. “Go talk to him.”

Madden: “You guys were tight?”

“Whatever you want to call it. We played board games, philosophized
about the state of the world, traded dating stories. His batting average was a lot better than mine. I tried to sleep with
broads while they were awake, which can be challenging.”

His closest friend in the pen was a rapist, an anesthesiologist who brought women back to his home, knocked them out, took
pictures of them naked and had sex with them while they lay there unconscious. It only took about two years and ten victims
before he got caught.

“Who else?” Burns asks.

He tells them he had another pal, Alain Dessain, who liked to rent apartments for the week then sublet the same apartment
to fifty other people for the year, walking away with their deposits. He was popped doing it in San Francisco, got off with
probation, then moved to New York, pulled the same stunt there, went to jail, came back to San Francisco and picked up a five-to-seven
bid for defrauding charities and violating his parole. The guy was a three-time loser but he was smart. His biggest flaw was
his limited repertoire; he kept committing the same crimes over and over. A light-skinned black guy who moved well among the
various prison factions, he talked a good game. Richie thought he’d have made a great political fund-raiser and organizer.
Dessain agreed. But now it was too late for that.

Way too fucking late.

The big problem, Dessian liked to point out, was that once you got a record you ended up behind the eight ball. It was hard
to get hired, even for crappy jobs, especially when the economy was bad and especially when you were black and had no college
diploma. He didn’t want to drive a bus. Menial labor wasn’t part of his DNA. What was he supposed to do? He liked hanging
out with successful people. He felt that’s where he belonged, he just didn’t want to do what it took to really get there.
He knew he was being stupid but people were stupid. They were consumed with their own political correctness and they kept
giving him their money because they didn’t want to appear racist for not trusting him. Was that such a crime, showing “wine-sniffing
Marina bitches” how stupid they were?

Richie smiles at Madden but he’s really smiling at the memory of Dessain’s perverse logic. There was a lot of that in prison.
A lot of perverse logic.