Lovers and Lawyers

by Lia Matera

  Howard sat up, brows puckering. “Feeling too battered to care what happens to him? Life without Mary…?”

  Mary! I stuffed my fists into my pockets. “I wonder if he—? You don’t suppose he wants to stay inside?” Refusing to discuss his defense, sticking to a bare outline of events. “Howie, he couldn’t want to stay in jail, could he?”

  Howie tilted his head, considering.

  “Or … What if he expects us to screw up?” Hiring an inexperienced kid to represent him, his ex-wife’s employee. Maybe it wasn’t a vote of confidence. Maybe it was self-sabotage. “He can’t think I’d screw up on purpose?”

  Howie was silent. The possibility had occurred to him.

  “You know I wouldn’t.”

  “Janet? If he does want to stay inside? Could he be protecting himself?”

  “From what? How much lower can you go than the county bedbug farm?”

  “Six feet under?” Howie squinted at the window. Mmmm Mmmm Koffee, the billboard promised. “Someone tried to kill him. Perhaps he feels safer behind bars right now.”

  “Safer? Kiddo, prisoners are murdered in their cells every day of the—” I turned away, shaken. “Where the hell’s my jacket?”

  I got to the county jail half an hour before Jack’s bail hearing. As the sheriffs deputy and I approached the short row of cells, I could hear someone retching, a drunk singing, voices speaking Spanish. I hoped Jack felt crowded enough to reconsider posting bail.

  When I saw the other prisoners, I gripped the deputy’s arm and pointed. “What are they doing here?”

  The deputy brushed my hand off his arm. “Processed a few hours ago. Cocaine. Possession for sale.”

  For a moment I stared at the two handsome Latinos. The drunk stopped singing to leer at me. I scanned the remaining cells for Jack. He was lying prone in the one between the drunk and the two men. His face was turned to the wall. “Jesus! They’ve killed him.”

  The deputy looked at me as if I were insane, especially after Jack rolled over and sat up.

  I leaned back against the wall, one hand over my heart. “Listen, those two men knew Mary Sutter—they sold her drugs. They might have been blackmailing her sister.”

  The young Latinos watched quizzically. The taller one murmured something in Spanish to the other.

  Jack sputtered, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The trouble is, you don’t care if they kill you, do you, Jack? You won’t give me the facts I need to acquit you, but you don’t want to spend your life behind bars.” Not the sort of thing a lawyer should say in public, but I couldn’t stop. “Well, I’m not going to let you stay here and get murdered.”

  The deputy stepped between me and the bars. “Nobody’s getting murdered in my jail.”

  “Nobody else, you mean?”

  A month earlier a drug dealer died in his cell on the eve of testifying against a co-defendant. Neighboring prisoners hadn’t “noticed” the dealer’s head crack open on the bars between the cells. The sheriff had called it accidental death, a case of slip and fall.

  I’d seen the body in a steel drawer. If the man slipped, he’d done it half a dozen times.

  The deputy turned purple.

  “Your Honor, not only is there no risk of flight in this case, but I believe the defendant is actually in physical, mortal danger if he remains in the county facility.”

  There were reporters behind me in the pew-like seats. I could hear excited whispers. I could feel the district attorney’s fury, the judge’s crotchety distaste for melodrama. But I didn’t seem to have much choice. I explained about Jaime and Andy, handing the judge and the D.A. each a copy of the photograph I’d found in Jack’s hutch.

  “These two men are now in the cell beside Mr. Krauder’s, Your Honor. I believe they arranged their own arrest in order to kill my client before his trial.”

  The judge pounded his gavel to silence the spectators.

  “Your Honor.” The district attorney sounded predictably skeptical. “We’ll be challenging the admissibility—and the relevance—of this photograph at another time, but I should state for the record that I have personal knowledge of the two men to whom counsel refers. Their names are Julio and Silvio Marcos. They were arrested for possession of narcotics on a tip from a reliable source.”

  Reliable source, that’s police code for any anonymous slimeball who phones them.

  “At the very least”—I struggled to keep calm—“they should be placed in another facility until bail is posted.”

  “I’ve never seen those men before,” Jack volunteered. “They’re not Jaime and Andy.”

  The judge, a sour old prune, glared at me. “Then I see little point in making special arrangements to separate these prisoners, do you, Miss Dale?”

  I never thought I’d hear myself say it about my own client: “He’s lying, Your Honor.”

  The D.A. all but gasped.

  “Approach the bench,” the judge barked. His tone said, Out to the woodshed with you, young lady.

  I gripped the oak rim of the judge’s bench and craned my neck to entreat him. “Please. I don’t want to give away the details of my defense, Your Honor, but those two men are involved—”

  The D.A. slapped the photograph I’d handed him. “These are different men. Even the defendant says so.”

  “The sun’s behind them. Look more closely. They’re the same—”

  “Janet, please.” The D.A. and I had faced each other in court too often to remain mere acquaintances. “I know you used to be married to the guy, but you’re being paranoid here.”

  Furious, I turned away from him. “Your Honor, it won’t hurt to separate these men from—”

  “Enough!” The judge thumped his blotter with a wizened hand. “This is not Los Angeles. You are well aware that we have only one facility here. And I am certainly not going to jeopardize the proceedings against these two men by busing them upstate, Miss Dale.”

  I could see from his face that further comment was useless. I glanced at the D.A. His air of concern was humiliating.

  I stalked back to counsel’s table. Jack’s mouth twisted into a frosty sneer. He said loudly, “This woman isn’t my lawyer. I don’t want her representing me.”

  The judge said, “What? Miss Dale, did the defendant authorize you to state an appearance?”

  I forced myself to look away from Jack. Idiot! “My associate, Howard Frost, is the defendant’s counsel of record, Your Honor. Mr. Frost couldn’t be here this afternoon. He’s in trial, and so I’m filling in—”

  “Then I don’t want bail.” Jack’s voice seethed with malice. “I’d rather stay where I am until—”

  “Shut up, Jack!”

  More commotion in the pews. The judge shouted with exasperation, “Miss Dale, why are you wasting this court’s time with a bail hearing if your client—Mr. Frost’s client—does not wish—” He rapped the gavel several times. “Quiet! All of you! This is not a ball game, this is a court of law.”

  There was very little doubt in my mind that with his next breath the judge would order Jack escorted back to his cell. I looked at Jack and hated him for what he was forcing me to do.

  “I won’t be a party to Mr. Krauder’s indirect suicide, Your Honor,” I insisted. “That’s what you’re asking me to do.” I spoke louder, over the judge’s fierce cry that I was in contempt of his court. “Jack knows he’ll get killed in jail, and he doesn’t care. He feels morally responsible. He wants to protect—” I gulped. I was losing control, I mustn’t do that. “You’d have to know Jack to understand. Someone he cares about, someone he thinks he’s wronged, is involved with drug dealers—with these two prisoners, Jaime and Andy. Don’t you see, they’re afraid Jack’s going to implicate them, and …”

  I looked around the courtroom. The judge’s livid outrage, the D.A.’s shocked pit
y … hysterical ex-wife, that’s what they were thinking. And I was remembering last month’s dead prisoner, with his broken, bloody forehead.

  In a moment the proceeding would be declared over, and Jack would be whisked away. I played my trump card.

  Jack’s lips parted, then his jaw dropped. “Damn,” he whispered, looking down the barrel of a revolver I’d just pulled from my briefcase.

  I saw the district attorney motion to the bailiff, and I swung the gun toward him instinctively before deciding it was safer to keep it trained on one person. And because I was taking him with me, that person had to be Jack.

  “Please,” I begged the judge. “Try to understand why I’m doing this. If it turns out the prisoners aren’t Jaime and Andy, okay. I’ll bring Jack to you. I swear it. But I can’t risk his going back in his cell now and getting killed.”

  There was a charged silence as the judge raised his arms. For a moment he was motionless, a robed scarecrow. Then he croaked, “Keep the aisles clear, please. I do not want the defendant endangered by any act of ours.”

  “I won’t go.” Jack lowered his head bullishly, eyes on the gun.

  I extended my arm until the gun was inches from his face: Careful, toro. “I’m throwing my career down the toilet for you, Jack. My career. To save your miserable life. Cooperate with me for once, goddam it.”

  The hand that held the gun was steady. I’d won trophies for marksmanship. I hoped Jack remembered them. After what seemed a span of years, he turned and led the way out of the courtroom.

  Spectators stirred, a flash cube popped. My hand remained steady. No one got heroic.

  The corridors were nearly empty. I’d asked for a late-afternoon hearing. The clerk of the court, a woman carrying a Danish, and a lawyer slumped on a Naugahyde bench all watched in pale alarm, making no move to interfere. We made it to my car, illegally parked beside the back entrance. I squealed out of the lot, checking for cruisers. Most of them were still across town, responding to a false alarm I’d phoned in before the hearing. I drove with one hand, bracing the muzzle of the gun against Jack’s crotch.

  “Don’t try to grab it, Jack. If it goes off, you won’t be dead, but well, you know.”

  I glanced at him. He was as white as tapioca. His eyes were closed, as if in prayer.

  It was imperative to ditch the car. The cops would soon have my license plate number. I pulled into the nearest underground parking garage. I was lucky, there was no one down there. I didn’t have to worry about concealing the gun as I motioned Jack out of the car and into the elevator.

  We got out at the top and found ourselves alone on a windy roof. Jack backed ten, fifteen feet away from me before I raised the gun again. “Let’s start over, Jackie. No more bullshit. Tell me what you know.”

  “This is only a four-story building. The fall might not kill me.”

  “The fall,” I repeated.

  “That’s what you have in mind, isn’t it? You’ll say I confessed to the murder and jumped off in remorse? You’ll say you tried to stop me, but I overpowered you. You’ll cry about how much you loved me, and everyone will believe you because you were willing to be disbarred for me.” His face twisted with contempt, and for the first time I felt my gun hand tremble. “Tell you what I know? I know you tricked me into marrying you and almost strangled me with your clinging and complaining. You were jealous of every woman I ever said hello to, and our divorce didn’t change that one bit. You think I didn’t see you spying on me and Mary? You and your damn telephoto lens. You took that picture of Stacy and her friends at our pool, didn’t you? Thinking it was Mary.”

  The distance between us seemed to increase. “No.”

  “You say you found it at my house. If you did, you planted it there.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “So the police would believe you thought Jaime and Andy were in jail with me. You know damn well those two guys aren’t Jaime and Andy. Hell, you probably got them busted. Your job puts you in contact with every drug dealer in town. All you had to do was choose two who looked a little like the picture and call the cops on them.”

  “Why should I—?”

  “So you’d have a reason to do this: Get me out of jail and finish the job you started when you poisoned the coffee.”

  I looked at him across the sooty expanse of roof. Broad of chest, long-legged, black hair blowing … handsome damn bastard.

  “You managed to sink some of my relationships, didn’t you, Janet? I’ve often wondered what you said to my accountant to make her quit like that. But you could see that Mary and I—” He kneaded his chest as though it ached. “We were too much in love to let you come between us. And you couldn’t stand it. You were going to kill both of us. But I skipped coffee that morning. And you know I’m not stupid. Sooner or later I was bound to see you’d done it. You’re the only person I know who’s crazy enough. I just wish to Christ I’d realized— I’ve had so much to deal with.” He slid both hands through his hair, gripping his head, rounding his shoulders. “I thought you were just being you. Until you pulled the gun, I didn’t—”

  “I love you, Jack.” If only he’d let me comfort him.

  “Love!” The word vibrated with loathing. His arms snapped to his sides like a soldier’s. “You’d have killed me when I got out on bail, wouldn’t you? Who’d suspect my lawyer? And when I told you I didn’t want to post bail, you had to arrange this little charade. Planting that photograph, getting those Latino guys busted, the scene you played in front of the jailer so you could get his testimony later. And, of course, ‘rescuing’ me today. Maybe you’ll get disbarred for it, but there’s gonna be a lot of sympathy for you, too—even when they find out you were ‘wrong’ about those two in jail. You’ll have a little breakdown, probably even sincere, over my death. And your pal the D.A. will go easy on you. You might not even do any time—hell, if anyone knows all the angles, it’s you.”

  “You shouldn’t have left me, Jack. Mary didn’t love you like I do.”

  He spat at me.

  “Fine, you bastard! Jump or be shot. Take your pick.”

  “What’ll you tell them if you shoot me?”

  “That you came at me to kill me.”

  “After confessing?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, it won’t work, Janet. There’s a witness.” He pointed behind me.

  And sure enough, there was Howie Frost, face crinkled in astonishment.

  “Janet?” Howie shook his head, not quite convinced this was happening. “My trial’s in recess—I got their expert disqualified.” Well, well, he was learning. “I stepped outside and saw your car at the rear entrance. And knowing how you feel about Jacko … I thought I’d better pull my car up behind, keep an eye out.” Howie hugged himself. “Not that I really believed— Oh, Janet. You need help.”

  I felt my lower lip quiver, my chin knot.

  “Give me the gun, Janet, do. It’ll be all right. We’ll get you into therapy—get you all the help you need.”

  “ ‘Help’!” Jack repeated. There was more than mere disgust in his voice. There was cold, concentrated hatred. “You think because you know every shrink and every judge in town, you’re going to walk away from this, don’t you, Janet? Beat the system like you do for the scum you represent.” He took a step toward me, raising a clenched fist. “Well, you’re not! Not if I have to—”

  “Oh, Howie, listen to him. He deserves to die. He’s been mean to me all along, for years—cheating on me, lying to me. He’s got to pay for it.”

  “It’s you I’m thinking of, Janet.” Howie stepped between me and Jack, holding out his hand. He looked like a frightened deer. “For God’s sake!” Howie, shrill? “For your own sake. Please. Give me the gun.”

  I could see Jack moving stealthily closer, using Howie for cover. I took a sideways step, trying to get a clear shot, but Howie ducked s
ideways, too, blocking my path.

  Damn Howie! He was my associate, my friend … and he’d sided with Jack. Everyone sided with Jack.

  Howie reached for the gun, Jack three paces behind him. Another second and they’d have me. Unless—

  I’d won a couple of insanity acquittals, I knew what the shrinks looked for. And I was a good actress—as a trial lawyer, I had to be. With luck I could pull it off.

  Two shots—one for Howie, one for Jack. That’s all it took.

  About the Author

  Lia Matera is the Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity Award–nominated author of nine novels. A graduate of UC Hastings College of the Law, where she was editor in chief of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Matera was a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School before becoming a full-time writer of legal mysteries. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by Lia Matera

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-6676-1

  This edition published in 2021 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.