The Disappearance (48 page)

“We got a
what
?” He smiles over at the jury. Their faces coming back to him are blank.

“A problem that doesn’t seem to have a solution.”

Jackson doesn’t respond. He can see Ray Logan giving him the palms down sign, to cool it.

“Because you didn’t know if Mr. Allison was drunk or sober.”

“He was sober.”

“How do you know?” Luke asks. This guy’s starting to talk too much. It’s a common disease among witnesses, particularly witnesses who have been around the block a time or three.

“I could tell looking at him. And they wouldn’t have let me talk to him if he wasn’t sober, it’s against regulations.”

“Ah!” Luke smiles. “Exactly my point. You can’t interrogate someone who’s intoxicated. But he was never given a test for that, so you didn’t know. No one knew.”

Once again, he turns to Judge Ewing. “Have I made my point now, Your Honor? If he’s intoxicated, the police are not allowed to question him. And if he is sober, they have no grounds to hold him, unless they inform him that he’s a suspect in a crime, read him his rights pertaining to that crime, let him bring in his lawyer, and so on. Either he shouldn’t have been there in the first place, or he shouldn’t have been interrogated. One or the other.” He stares up at Ewing, challenging the judge to dispute him this time. “I move, once again, to strike all evidence taken from Mr. Allison’s car, house, and anywhere else, under the search and seizure applications of the law.”

Ewing has been preparing for this for weeks—it’s cost him sleep, trying to figure out what to do. He can’t let this trial die on a so-called technicality, no matter how compelling and fundamentally right it might be. He has his ruling on his bench, right in front of him. It’s a beautiful job of finessing, a major-league curve ball. “Regardless of whether the defendant was legally intoxicated at the time of his arrest,” he reads, “by the time he was questioned by Detective Jackson, the effects of any intoxication, as commonly understood under the four-hour sobering-up period, would have worn off sufficiently that he could be interrogated and understand what was going on.” He looks up. “Motion to strike is denied.”

Luke knew all along that Ewing wouldn’t end this trial on an interpretation of law—the man would be run out of town on a rail. But to basically endorse trashing the Miranda rule, that comes close to flouting the law.

The ruling makes something crystal clear to him, which he’s known, floating around in the back of his brain, but he hasn’t allowed to surface, because it’s a bitch to face: He’s not going to win this fight on points. He has to win by a knockout. He has to find somebody else, other than Joe Allison, who is carrying so much guilt on his shoulders that no jury will dare convict Allison.

He’s got his man. Doug Lancaster. He has to play every single card he has to make Doug look guilty—maybe not of this crime, he can’t prove Doug did it, but of everything else. Bribery. Threats. Lying to the police. Deflect the thrust from his client to Doug, as was done down in L.A. when O. J. Simpson’s defense team managed to make the trial a referendum on crooked cops instead of the prosecution of a wife-killer.

Not the way he prefers to work, but he has one job—to get Joe Allison off. By whatever legal means he can.

Maria Gonzalez takes the stand. She’s poised, she’s prepared. She stands tall, taking the oath. She’s testifying in a court of law in the United States of America, her chosen country. She takes this very seriously.

Logan elicits who she is, how long she worked for the Lancasters, her relationship with Emma, and so forth. Then Logan asks the question that gets to the heart of his case, and it’s stunning. “What did you see that night? Late that night, the night Emma Lancaster was taken from her room? Describe for the people in this court what you saw, Mrs. Gonzalez.”

She adjusts her seat, shifting so that she is sitting absolutely straight. Eyes straight ahead, her voice crisp and clear, she tells her story:

She had worked late cleaning up after Mrs. Lancaster’s party and was going to spend the night in the house, go home first thing in the morning. Sunday morning, her day off, she would be home before her own children woke up and she would get them all ready and they would go to church and have a family day.

The telephone rang in her room in the middle of the night. She had her own telephone, so that her family could call her and not disturb the Lancasters. It was one of the perks they gave her, because she was so good at her job.

Her youngest was sick. A terrible ear infection. He suffered often from them. Her husband was trying, but he couldn’t cope. The baby was screaming. She had to come home, she had to take care of her own children.

She got dressed, she let herself out of her room in the servants’ section. It was a nice room, very well furnished. Like Emma’s room, it opened onto the backyard. There was a patio outside the door, which she could walk along to the side of the property, where she had her own car parked in the courtyard.

As she began walking to her car, worrying about her baby, she saw a figure moving across the lawn, away from the rear, towards the front of the property, near where she had her own car parked. It was a tallish figure, wearing a baseball-style hat with a swoosh on the front and a thigh-length windbreaker.

Whoever he was
—
she felt sure it was a man
—
he wasn’t supposed to be there. She moved into the shadows against the wall as she watched him.

He passed by her on his way, about ten yards from her at the nearest distance. The moon was low but plenty full, casting enough light for anyone to see.

As the man reached the gate that led out of the backyard, he turned one time, looking back into the property. In the general direction of the gazebo at the far end. And when he turned to look, she saw his face for a quick moment.

If she had never seen this man, she wouldn’t have been able to know who he was, have him imprinted in her brain, she wouldn’t have been able, only a few days ago, to find the courage to come to the police and tell them what she saw that night. She wouldn’t have been able to tell them that she saw Joe Allison in the backyard that night, if she hadn’t seen him hundreds of times before. But she had seen him hundreds of times before, and that’s how she knew it was him. Joe Allison. Walking across the backyard of the Lancaster estate at three o’clock in the morning.

Everyone in the courtroom sits in stunned silence. Ray Logan is motionless at the podium. Even the sheriff’s deputies, the toughest cases, are standing and staring in disbelief. No one moves, not even the hard-boiled reporters, who should be ready to bolt, even they sit glued to their chairs.

Luke is stunned beyond imagining. Where in the world did this come from? And why didn’t he know? He looks at Allison, sitting a foot from him, their shoulders almost touching. Allison is staring straight ahead, eyes unblinking, body rigid.

He did it. The bastard actually did it. I should’ve known all the time, the way he held everything back. The cynical, murdering fuck has taken Luke Garrison down—his lawyer, the man who had come back here to defend him, leaving himself open to every kind of wound imaginable and suffering most of them, leaving him dead now in this trial, a dead skunk in the middle of the road, stinking to high hell.

“Ah, you bastard.” The words come out in a whispered exhalation. “You fucking bastard.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Oh, fuck you.” He slumps in his chair. He feels like he’s dying.

“I didn’t kill her.”

From a far distance, as out of a chilly fog, the sepulchral, now maddening voice of Ray Logan: “Your witness.”

Before the cross-examination begins, the lawyers and Judge Ewing meet in chambers. Maria Gonzalez is also in attendance, under judge’s orders. Anticipating Luke’s objection, Logan weighs in, starting to explain almost before the door is closed behind them.

“She just came to us with this,” he tells Judge Ewing and Luke. Luke has left Allison back in the courtroom—he doesn’t want the man to stink up the small chambers, and he wants to put some space, if only for a few minutes, between them. To make sure that he doesn’t lean over and try to strangle the sonofabitch to death with his bare hands. “Two days ago.”

“This is outrageous,” Luke fumes. “There is no excuse in the world why I didn’t have this.”

Ewing nods. “Why have you withheld this?” he asks the former maid sternly.

Her head is down. She doesn’t respond.

“She didn’t withhold it deliberately, Your Honor, and neither did we.” Logan’s got the goods and he’s protecting her. “We didn’t know.” He looks down at the woman. “No one had asked her if she had seen anything like that, and she was too scared to come forward.”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Luke says in disgust. “Judge, he can’t do that.”

Again, Ewing denies him. “Witnesses come forward at the last minute,” he tells Luke. “It happens. It happened when you were the district attorney, if I may refresh your memory. You interviewed her months ago, didn’t you? Why didn’t you think to ask her if she had seen anything that night? If you had, Luke, we wouldn’t be here now.”

“So what do I do now?” Luke asks plaintively.

“Defend your client,” the judge tells him. “As you have been doing, all along.”

“Mrs. Gonzalez.”

She’s on the stand again. Luke, now ready to start his cross, has just had a harrowing, acrimonious half hour with Joe Allison, his client.

“Tell me you didn’t do it,” he said. “Tell me that wasn’t you she saw. Please don’t tell me that was really you there, that night. Don’t tell me that, please.”

Allison couldn’t lie anymore. “I was there that night,” he admitted, as Luke paced the small room, his gut exploding. “And it was me who took her out of the room.” He looked at Luke, shaking his head. “I should’ve told you. But if I had, you’d be off the case. So I shut up.” As forcefully as he did on the first day they met, he adds, “But I did not kill her.”

I had dropped Nicole off, gone home, done some reading, gone to bed. Dead to the world, the telephone rang. Grabbing it, groggy, falling over myself, sprawled out on the bed. “Hello?” I said. A croak, like a bronchitic frog. Clearing my voice, “Hello,” again.

“Joe.” It was a soft voice, a whisper.

“Emma?” I knew the voice, knew it well.

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you!’ She sounded whiny, as was often the case, but with a fear-edge I hadn’t heard before. She was always so tough and in control, amazingly so, especially for someone her age.

“I’ve called you, too. We keep missing each other. Where are you?”

“At home. In my room. I need to see you.”

I was half asleep and I didn’t like the sound of this, she had never called me late like this before, usually Nicole was staying with me and I didn’t want other women or, in Emma’s case, girls, calling me here, Nicole would get suspicious in a heartbeat.

“Is your girlfriend there?”

I should have lied. If I had said yes, all this would be so different. I wasn’t awake enough yet to figure that out, to lie, which she would have expected, not the lying but that Nicole was there, in my bed next to me, either asleep, or awake listening, wanting to know who in the world calls at two-thirty in the morning.

“No,” I answered honestly. “I’m alone.”

“I need to see you.”

I was up now, sitting on the edge of the bed, drinking from the glass of water I kept on the night stand next to the bed, my mouth was dry from sleeping open-mouthed and from the wine earlier. “All right. Meet me at … Starbucks, over by Von’s. I’ll meet you there tomorrow morning. Around ten.” I wanted to sleep in. “Can you get someone to drop you off without making a big deal out of it?”

“Now. I need to see you now. Right now.”

“Right now?” I looked at my alarm clock. A quarter to three, almost? No, how could I?

“Go back to sleep, Emma. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“Now, Joe. Right away.”

I think I said, “Is something wrong?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.” Still whispering, as if afraid someone might be listening in.

She instructed me to come around to the back of the house, to the back doors to her bedroom. She would leave the doors unlocked, the alarm off. But I had to come now, as soon as possible.

So I did. Who knew what she’d do if I didn’t? I threw on a pair of jeans, T-shirt, windbreaker, baseball hat pulled down low over my eyes. I didn’t think anyone would see me, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

I parked at the edge of the property, where my car couldn’t be spotted by the local security people, in case they were cruising in the neighborhood, entered the gate at the side, and went around to the back. I knew her door. I had been in and out of it before.

I turned the knob. It was unlocked, like she’d said it would be. I pushed the door open, and entered Emma’s bedroom.

She was awake. She was sitting on her bed, Indian-style, with a blanket from her bed wrapped around her thin shoulders. It was dark out, but I could see her in the moonlight, sitting there in her nightgown under the blanket, looking up at me.

Then I froze. There were other girls in the room! Two other girls, one in the spare bed, the other on the floor. Both asleep, but what did they know? Had they been awake when she had called me? Was this some kind of perverted teenage-girl game?

She beckoned me to her with a crooked finger. When I was right upon her, close enough to reach out and touch her, she raised her mouth to my ear and said, “They’ve been asleep the whole time.” Then she lifted her arms to me, wanting me to pick her up, carry her out of there.

I did. I carried her away, closing the door behind us.

I carried her across the lawn, all the way down to the gazebo. We had rendezvoused there before. It was a good place to go and not be seen. The grass was wet, I slipped carrying her.

“I’m pregnant.” We were sitting on the floor, on her blanket. She had a stub of cigarette in her hand she had scrounged from somewhere in the debris on the floor, and was taking a couple of hits off it.