by Adam Mitzner
We’d had a handful of discussions regarding the elephant in the room—that Nicky would likely be charged with murdering Samantha Remsen. Nicky had consistently told me the same thing he had told the police on day one: after the party, he went home alone, expecting to see his wife shortly thereafter, and she never appeared.
I had the sense that our mutual avoidance of the matter was almost superstitious, akin to not talking to your pitcher during a no-hitter. If either of us even mentioned the possibility that Nicky would be charged with Samantha’s murder, or worse, if we planned for its eventuality, we might affect the outcome.
“I believe both things, Nicky,” I answered. “The guilty should be punished, but only by the state if they are proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. What God—or the universe—wants to do with the guilty is a different question altogether, and one that is, thankfully, above my pay grade.”
36.
I’ve never much liked LA. A few years before, a hotshot LA attorney who had just won a multimillion-dollar civil rights suit against the LAPD reached out to me about combining our practices. “You’d be national, Clint,” he said. “The first call of every movie star, as well as every finance guy.” I passed, in part because I knew that representing Californians meant I’d have to live there at least part of the year. As it turned out, my would-be partner later got himself indicted for cheating his clients, so it was a good decision in the end.
That said, I didn’t find much to complain about concerning Nicky’s life in the Golden State. Sunshine every day has a certain appeal, and Nicky lived an extremely comfortable, even luxurious, existence. Case in point was his home, which he referred to as a cottage: five thousand square feet smack on the beach in Malibu.
When I awoke the next morning, it was to the smell of freshly brewed coffee.
“It seems as if I certainly made the right choice in accommodations,” I said upon joining him in the kitchen. Not only was there coffee, but popovers had apparently just been removed from the oven, because they were still in the baking pan, steam escaping from their tops.
“One bad review and my entire Airbnb business goes down the tubes,” Nicky said.
Food and drink in hand, we adjourned to the patio. The view was magnificent. The Pacific in all its glory.
“You’ve done all right for yourself, my friend,” I said.
He didn’t acknowledge the compliment. At least not at first.
After a few moments of quiet, he said, “I’m sixty-seven years old. When I turned, I don’t know, maybe fifty, certainly by sixty, I started viewing my life backward. Kind of like a Benjamin Button thing. It usually takes me at least three, closer to four, years to write a book. And I might be slowing down. It was nearly five years between my last two, and I’m two years into my latest and I don’t see finishing it next year. Even the year after that might be ambitious. Which means I’ve probably got two more books in me. Three at the outside. That’ll take me to seventy-five-ish. Philip Roth hung it up at eighty. So if I’m lucky, really lucky, I will leave this mortal coil with eleven books to my name.” He laughed. “And a New York Times obituary that says my best book was my first.”
“Many writers would kill just to have a New York Times obituary.”
He shook his head. “That’s not my point. I’m not lamenting that I haven’t written a book that will be read in English classes a hundred years from now. It’s the opposite, actually. When I met Samantha, it was the first time I found something more important in life than my writing. A way for me to be happy that had nothing to do with professional success. I knew she was the one for me because my writing no longer mattered. Being with her was all I cared about. It’s what made me happy. And now, without her, I feel like I’m gone too.”
“When Charlotte died . . . ,” I began, then stopped. “Do you have any idea how many sentences I begin that way? I hate that.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t even begin to imagine.”
I nodded to acknowledge his ignorance on this point. Losing a spouse was nothing like losing a child. I could speak with authority, having suffered both.
“What I meant to say was that Charlotte’s murder caused me to question why I was still alive. I’d never be happy again. I knew that. So what was the point, right?”
“Exactly,” he said. “What is the point?”
“To keep on living. So that you can continue to love the people who you are fortunate enough to be able to love. And live in such a way as to make yourself worthy of their love too.”
“Easy for you to say. You have a daughter. I don’t think anyone’s life would be diminished if I ended it all tomorrow.”
He said it without a hint of self-pity or amusement.
“My life would be less without you in it. It has been less since 1986. I’m not saying that tragic things happen for a reason, because they don’t. It’s just random awfulness. But I am saying that sometimes there’s some good that comes out of the most horrible tragedies. The fact that we’ve reentered each other’s lives doesn’t make up for Samantha’s death. I know you’d gladly never hear from me again if it could bring your wife back. I feel the same way about my daughter. But at the same time, I recognize that it was because of what happened to Charlotte that I made the decision to try harder with the people that I loved, to be more forgiving of them, and that positive consequence of her murder is what led me back to you.”
For a few moments we fell silent, staring out at the ocean, sipping our coffee. I was about to add that no one should have dark thoughts while enjoying such beauty, when Nicky said, “Can I tell you something in an attorney-client way?”
I hear that a lot. What follows is almost always an admission of guilt.
“I take the position that every conversation we have is privileged,” I said, even though, as a legal matter, it wouldn’t hold up in court.
“I’m scared. I swear on my life that I didn’t kill Samantha. But if I’m arrested for it . . . at my age, I’m not going to go through another trial. If that makes me a coward, so be it. Hemingway offed himself, and people still read his books.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what to say, or if Nicky expected me to say anything at all. Perhaps this was just his way of warning me not to get too attached to our newly rekindled friendship because it might be short-lived.
“I know that feeling too,” I finally said. “And at the risk of being a broken record, when Charlotte died, I felt like checking out right then and there. On some days, when it was its worst, it was only not wanting to leave Ella alone that kept me around. But, now, with some time behind me, I’m glad that I stuck around. And I won’t lie to you—I’m not happy to be alive every day. Some days, the grief feels like it’s physically crushing me, and I fear I won’t be able to take it. But then I do. And the next day, I’m glad that I did because even the bad days allow me to hope that tomorrow will be better. So my advice to you is to take it one day a time, and when one of those days becomes too unbearable, call me.”
He didn’t say anything after that about either the possibility of suicide or his lack of involvement in Samantha’s murder. I doubted it was because my words had persuaded him to keep the faith even if everything turned against him. Instead, I got the sense that he was planning how he would end his life, and looking out to the Pacific seemed to provide the answer.
37.
The silence between us was finally broken by my phone. The picture on the screen was of Ella.
“My daughter,” I said to Nicky.
“Tell her that I say hello,” he said, then excused himself to refill his coffee.
It was conventional wisdom among those who knew us that Anne’s passing would be hardest on Charlotte. She was six years younger than her sister; the thinking went that losing her mother would have a more indelible impact on her than on Ella, who was already a teenager and more or less the person she would have become without experiencing such a tragedy.
Anne told me it wouldn’t work out that way.
“Hey, Dad,” came Ella’s cheerful voice through the phone. “How’d it go at UCLA? Did you tell the garbageman story?”
I chuckled. “No. I should have, though. That story always kills.”
I’ve asked others with adult children if their kids check up on them the way Ella does with me. They tell me that their children are attentive and vigilantly looking for signs of dementia, but the relationship is as one-way as it’s always been—the parent worrying about the child, and the child taking for granted that the parent will always be there to help. I wish it were that way between Ella and me, but it hasn’t been for a long time. Even before Charlotte’s murder, Ella looked after me as much as I tried to be the one looking after her. Despite doing my best to honor Anne’s wishes, I couldn’t change my daughter from being the person she was destined to be.
“Tell me about you,” I said. “What’s going on there?”
“Same-old, same-old. I’ve been working night and day to get ready for this trial that’s been on Judge Kim’s calendar for literally three months. We were supposed to pick a jury a week from Monday, and then yesterday her clerk called and said the judge had an unavoidable conflict, and the next available spot she has is early next year.”
“So it gives you some time off, then.”
“Ha. Not exactly. Just means I have to attend to a dozen other work fires that I was able to disregard with the I’m about to start a trial excuse.”
“How’s Gabriel?” I asked, because I was much more interested in my daughter’s life outside the office, even if she wasn’t.
“He’s good. He wants to get away for a few days, but we didn’t budget for a vacation right now.”
“Why don’t you two go out to East Hampton?”
“Maybe.”
I was fluent enough in Ella-speak to know that meant no. Even as a child, Ella was never a big fan of the conspicuous consumption of the Hamptons, and now that she was a public servant at the DA’s office, and dating a cop, she liked it even less.
“How’s your friend?” she asked.
Another tic I’d noticed with Ella. She never called Nicky by name. He was always your friend. I might have chalked that up to her being too busy to remember the names of my friends, but she always said it with an unmistakable tone of disapproval.
“He’s good. I’m sitting on the patio of his house in Malibu overlooking the Pacific as we speak.”
“So do you no longer hate LA?”
“Nope. Still do. Just not quite as much.”
She laughed. Ella had Anne’s laugh, throaty and hard, as if it came from somewhere deep within her. Every time I heard it, I closed my eyes in an effort to recapture Anne’s timbre. I was already having difficulty recalling Charlotte’s laugh, which was higher pitched and lighter than her sister’s.
“What’s that?” Ella asked.
She was responding to the ring of Nicky’s front doorbell, which was apparently loud enough to be heard not just on the patio, but also three thousand miles away. “Just the front door.”
“I think it’s nice that you have a new friend.”
“Not new. Rather old, actually.”
“I wasn’t finished. I was about to say that I only wish your new-old friend wasn’t someone who murdered his wife.”
“C’mon, Ella. You don’t know that, and I don’t believe it.”
“Clinton,” Nicky yelled from the front of the house.
I could hear the panic in his voice. I’m not sure whether in a different context I would have reached the same conclusion about what was happening, but I knew immediately.
“I gotta go,” I told Ella. “Sorry.”
As soon as I set foot inside the house, I saw the cops at the front door. Large men, both in uniform.
Nicky’s eyes had a vacant look, the kind you get when you no longer care about what’s going on around you. I wondered if he was regretting not ending his life when he had the chance. One of the cops was reading Nicky his rights while his partner clicked handcuffs around Nicky’s wrists.
“It’s going to be okay,” I told Nicky. To the cops I said, “Where are you taking him?”
“There’s a website for you to find arrestees,” the rights-reading cop responded.
They were already moving to the door. Nicky looked at me, and I was instantly transported back in time. He had that same deer-in-the-headlights expression as he’d had at his house in Mount Vernon thirty-four years ago.
“He asserts his right to counsel,” I said.
Neither of the two cops acknowledged my invocation. They had by now broken the plane of Nicky’s front door, pulling Nicky between them.
“Nicky, tell them you invoke your right to counsel!” I shouted.
“I invoke my right to counsel,” he said in a voice much weaker than mine.
“We heard you the first time, counselor,” the handcuff-clinking cop said without turning around.
As soon as the black-and-white receded from view, I called Joan Celebron. She was my pick as the best lawyer on the West Coast. She was also currently my cocounsel representing Steven Lancaster, the founder and CEO of Tech X, a social media company that was the current fad among the tween set. Lancaster’s insider trading case was entering its second year, with no end in sight in large part because Joan and I were sticking to the tried-and-true strategy of delay for delay’s sake, especially with a defendant out on bail.
“Hey, Clint. What did Hop-a-Long do this time?” Joan said, referencing the pejorative nickname she used to refer to Assistant District Attorney Hopkins, who was prosecuting the Lancaster case.
“I’m not calling about that. I need your help on something new. Have you heard of Nick Zamora?”
“Yeah. The guy who killed Samantha Remsen.”
Criminal defense lawyers are no different from cops or prosecutors in this regard—we think everyone who’s not our client is guilty. And most of our own clients too.
“He’s a childhood friend, and he was just arrested for allegedly killing Samantha Remsen. I’m going to need local counsel.”
38.
Lost Hills didn’t seem that bad to me—as prisons go, that is. Which is not to say that it wasn’t hell on earth. Generally speaking, prisons are like colleges, in that what makes one better or worse has more to do with the population than the facilities.
Joan was already there when I arrived. She said she’d checked in with security, but they hadn’t yet been able to locate Nicky.
“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.
“The people who work at the jail are always the last to know who’s been put in their facility,” she explained. “Sometimes it takes two or three days before an arrestee is found in the system. I don’t know how it is in the Big Apple, but in the City of Angels, they get three days to arraign, which is just another way of saying that they have three days to find your client after an arrest. Does New York have the death penalty?” she asked.
“No,” I answered reflexively. “Actually, we do, but not for murdering your wife. Only for murders involving people in the criminal justice system.”
“Well, if the potential penalty is life in prison, the judge still can’t provide for bail during the preliminary hearing phase. That means your friend will be in lockup for a while. By law, they don’t have to hold the PC hearing for ten days.”
When a citizen of California is charged with a crime that took place in New York, the local police are not permitted to fly across the country to transport him to New York. Instead, an extradition process must be followed: the New York
authorities request permission from the governor of California to make the arrest. That formality had occurred before LA’s finest showed up at Nicky’s door. The final step before the East Hampton police could bring Nicky back east to stand trial was for a California judge to find “probable cause”—the very low standard needed to obtain an indictment or an arrest warrant—that he was guilty of murder.
“I’m going to waive extradition,” I said.
“Really?”
“There’s no way he’s not going to be extradited back to New York.”
“True, but you know as well as anyone that making the prosecution put on its evidence in a PC hearing isn’t about winning. It’s about getting free discovery. The Hamptons cops will have to put on enough evidence to establish probable cause for the arrest. So you might learn something you wouldn’t have, or get one of the cops to lock himself into a story that hurts the prosecution at trial.”
Joan’s take on the probable cause hearing was the conventional wisdom. So I nodded as if she had persuaded me. She hadn’t, though. In fact, I’d already left a message with Jack Ethan, the Suffolk County District Attorney, asking him to have the ADA in charge of Nicky’s case call me so we could schedule the arraignment at the earliest possible time.
Jack returned my call while Joan and I were still waiting for Nicky to be found in Lost Hills.
“Clint,” he said, as if we were old friends.
I knew Jack from his days as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, and also because he was the younger brother of Benjamin Ethan, who was considered to be the dean of the white-collar criminal bar, or at least its white-shoe, Big Law version. I’d had no idea that Jack had left the city until about four years ago, when out of the blue he hit me up for a contribution to his campaign for DA. I made the maximum donation, not because I thought Jack would be a great DA but because I considered $2,500 a fair fee for being able to get the Suffolk County DA on the phone if I needed to. By returning my call now, he was repaying that debt, as well as soliciting a contribution for his reelection.
