Fox is Framed

by Lachlan Smith

  “He knows how to ask for help when he needs it. Not like before.”

  I hadn’t meant this comment to sting Jeanie, but I saw that it did. He’d never wanted kids when they were married. He’d never believed in days off or downtime, other than the rare occasions when he decided to get high or drunk. And he never recognized such weaknesses in others, including Jeanie, who’d been both his spouse and his law partner for over a decade.

  “Teddy deserves this,” she said. “All of it. And they’re much better than they were. But I still think we need to get them some help. A professional, a person who’s being paid to be here, not just us checking in whenever we have the time.” She sighed, then changed the subject. “I just hope he’s right about your father.”

  “Keith Locke was the real killer.” Just as my brother had been preparing the habeas corpus petition summarizing the discoveries he’d made in his own personal investigation into my father’s case, he’d been shot in the head by the son of the man who’d been my mother’s lover. Having discovered the existence of the affair, Keith, then a teenager, had gone to confront my mother. Probably he hadn’t known what he wanted from that encounter until he saw her. In a blind fury of rage and shame and lust, he’d raped her and beaten her to death, leaving her for me to find. My father had been convicted of the crime, and I’d accepted his guilt.

  Teddy, however, had not. But instead of trying to convince me of my father’s innocence he’d hid his loyalty to him, in the mistaken belief that he was somehow sheltering me from knowledge that would torment a more loyal son than I was. A few years ago, feeling that Teddy was getting too close to the truth, Keith Locke once again had turned to violence.

  “I still can’t make up my mind. All I’ve seen is the evidence Teddy submitted, and the judge’s order. It doesn’t say that your dad’s innocent, only that evidence was withheld showing she’d been with another man. What the order doesn’t point out is how that withheld evidence possibly could strengthen the prosecution’s case. If your mother had been with another man, and your father caught her at it . . .” She glanced at my face, then looked away. “All I’m saying is that if there’s a deal on the table, he might want to take it,” she finished.

  I looked away, suddenly annoyed with her for her unsolicited advice, and with myself for feeling that she might be right.

  Chapter 3

  A few days later, figuring that by now my father must have told her the big news, I called Dot. “My name is Leo Maxwell,” I said. “My father gave me your number.”

  “Oh,” she said and laughed with a richness that gave way to caution. “This is a surprise. Is something wrong? Has Lawrence . . .”

  “No, nothing’s wrong.” From her surprise, I knew my father hadn’t told her about the judge’s order. Was he unable to work up the courage to share the best news he’d ever received in his life? “Dad just wanted us to meet. He asked me to call.”

  A pause. “Look, you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

  “I’ll explain everything when we meet in person,” I promised.

  She told me to meet her at a Starbucks near her apartment in San Rafael. “I’ll be the fat one wearing leather.”

  A hog was parked prominently near the Starbucks entrance, one of the deluxe model Softails, the sun gleaming off its polished chrome. I went in, and my eyes immediately found her. As promised, she was a large woman in leather chaps and coat, with the flourish of a flowered silk scarf. She was about five ten, two hundred pounds, between fifty-five and sixty, with gray hair pulled back. Her tiny mug of espresso stood untouched. As I walked in her eyes took my measure.

  We shook hands. She wore no wedding band or any other visible jewelry. “I’m not what you expected,” she said, her gaze easily holding mine. “You thought you were coming to meet some emotional invalid. That’s what your brother thought. That’s what he was hoping for. When he saw his error, he tried to run me off. You’re looking at the bitch who wore Teddy Maxwell down.”

  “You’re right,” I admitted. “You’re not what I expected at all.”

  “But then again, you hardly know your father, so how could you know what to expect in the woman he’s engaged to?”

  “Right again.”

  “I know plenty about you. Normally that would put me at the advantage, but you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know something I didn’t. Lawrence is proud. You didn’t want him in your life, and he’s going to be damned if he’s going to beg you to be involved in his. He wants you to make the first move. It’s asinine. You going to let another twenty years go by? To hell with pride.”

  “He doesn’t have much choice about it. Neither do I, for that matter. You see, there’s been an unexpected development. His sentence has been vacated. There’s a possibility that he may be getting out.”

  She just stared, her face gone rigid with shock. Then without a word she rose and walked past me out of the coffee shop.

  I heard the hog fire up, and, deciding to follow her, made it to my truck just in time to see the motorcycle growl past out of the lot. I followed and managed to keep Dot in sight as she turned onto Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, heading west toward Fairfax, where she turned onto the Bolinas road over the mountains to the sea.

  I stayed behind her. That scenic road up the flanks of Mount Tamalpais was a favorite of mine, and I’d ridden it several times in both directions on my road bike. At the top of the climb, she pulled off at the Pine Mountain trailhead and killed her engine.

  I parked beside her. She took off her helmet, freed her hair, and glanced over at me with displeasure but not surprise. “He couldn’t even tell me himself,” she said as I got out of my truck. “He has to send the son who despises him.”

  “I don’t despise him.”

  “I’m supposed to go to him, not the other way around. I’m to make the first move. Court him the way he courted me. Well, what did he think it meant when I told him I’d marry him?”

  “I suppose he thought you never believed he’d get out, so you’d never have to go through with it.”

  She was still straddling the bike, staring out over the hills, mottled brown and green. The wind was fresh on our faces. “Have to. He’s always been tormented by the fear that I chose him only because I want a man someone keeps in a cage, like a pet that you take out when you’re ready to play with it.” She glanced at me. “The truth is him being locked up is the second biggest tragedy of my life.”

  “How’d you meet?” I asked, with delicacy.

  “He helped my son make parole. Scotty was dead of an overdose six months later. I started visiting Lawrence after Scotty’s death, trying to get to the bottom of what that place did to my boy. Believe me, I’d never have stepped foot in that prison if I’d known where it would lead. But I didn’t seem to have any choice. I wanted to marry him, but he wouldn’t agree. He said we should wait until he got out. I thought he was the one who didn’t want me.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but it doesn’t sound like you’re happy that he might be getting out.”

  She gave me a sharp look. “It’s the best news anyone could have brought me. But I’m worried that he’s going to push me away, reject me before I can reject him. Precisely because happiness is within our reach, and because he doesn’t think he deserves it.”

  “I think you ought to talk to him.”

  “He wanted you to give me the news because he wants to make it easy for me to back out and prove his deepest fears.”

  She must have seen the truth in my eyes. “Shit.” She looked away. “I can’t tell you how much that stings. He’s going to make this so insulting, so painful for us both. But I’m not going to give him what he wants. You tell him that I won’t let him ruin the best thing that ever happened to me. To us. If he wants to break our engagement, he can tell me himself.”

  She put her helmet back on, kicked the bike to life, swung it
back around in a half circle, and drove away toward Bolinas and Point Reyes.

  ~ ~ ~

  On Tuesday I again drove out to San Quentin, this time bringing Teddy with me. He’d been reluctant to leave home, but Debra was there, and I’d convinced him that his wife and child would be fine. “Dad wants to thank you in person,” I said. “And he’d like to see the pictures of Carly.”

  During the drive Teddy was tense, stressed out with fears about what could happen at home in his absence. I’d told him about my visit with Dot, but his only reaction had been a grunt. “How could you not have told me that Dad was engaged?” I asked, though I suppose the answer ought to have been obvious. Where our father was concerned, Teddy’d always had a talent for keeping secrets.

  “Dad didn’t want me to tell you,” he said. “He thought you’d think less of him, or something. And, he and I never saw eye to eye about Dot. I never understood this so-called engagement of theirs. It seemed to me that she was using him to fulfill some need of hers, that him being inside was part of the attraction.”

  “I guess now we’ll see. If he gives her the chance. After all these years, she deserves a chance, don’t you think?”

  Teddy just shrugged, obviously uncomfortable. To change the subject, I described in more detail my conversation with Angela Crowder.

  “So they’ve dumped this one on me,” she said to me on the phone. “For the last week I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it. There’s no one around here who has any connection to the case. I’m not that old, for Christ’s sake. So I’m not sitting here thinking I have to cover my ass or anyone else’s. That’s not the kind of prosecutor I am. You know that, Leo. You know I always give it to you straight.”

  “Do I know that?” I asked her.

  “So here’s the deal,” she said. “It’s only good until the hearing next week. If we have to go before the judge, it comes off the table. Second-degree murder, time served, the usual conditions. He walks out of that courtroom a free man, and we all put the past behind us.”

  “The past isn’t even the past,” I told her. “Not for him, and not for me. Not until the state dismisses these charges.”

  We’d see her at the hearing, I said.

  “So what do you think, should he take the deal?” Teddy asked when I finished recapping my conversation.

  “Jeanie has a point. The withheld evidence could actually bolster the prosecution’s case, give him a motive he didn’t have before. But no, the thought of him pleading guilty puts a bad taste in my mouth. Obviously we’ve got to tell him about the offer, but it seems to me that they ought to dismiss the charges.”

  “I agree,” Teddy said, looking uncomfortable with the reversal of our roles, me automatically taking the lead and he looking to me for confirmation of what he was thinking. “But if he’s got a chance to walk away from it, time served . . . Part of me thinks he’s dumb not to grab the deal.”

  “That’s his decision,” I said. “We don’t get to make it for him.”

  My tone was sharper than I’d intended, and my words had the effect of shutting down further debate. I wanted our father to fight, and at the moment I wasn’t interested in probing my motives. As with my last visit, we had to wait over half an hour at the guard shack in the wind and cold out there on the bay before they’d let us in. During our wait, we didn’t speak any more of the deal that was on the table, a deal that Teddy clearly wanted my father to take.

  One of the officers had decided to be a hard-ass. He wanted us to see Lawrence in the regular visitors’ room, where conversations were recorded and there could be no expectation of privacy. After making us wait around just because he could, he finally let us go through to the attorney-client conference area.

  “Hey there, Papa,” Lawrence said when the guard finally brought him in.

  Teddy rose, and our father clasped hands with him, the closest he could get to a hug with the olive-jacketed guards watching through the glass. “I knew you could do it.” Lawrence’s voice was tight, higher than normal. His excitement was palpable, in contrast with the impatience he’d shown toward me the other day. “Teddy, they can’t stop talking about you in here. People coming up to me I’ve never met, saying, ‘That boy of yours, he never gave up on you.’ You’re a hero to every poor son of a bitch in this place. You had every reason to give up and you never did.”

  “We had a little holdup there,” Teddy said, his hand still in our father’s.

  “You got shot in the fucking head. You call that a holdup?” Lawrence shook his head disbelievingly. “You know I’m the whole reason he was so hot to get his law license back, just to show those fuckers that Teddy Maxwell always wins.”

  Lawrence took his time with the photos Teddy’d brought. Finally he slipped the stack back into the envelope. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “You ought to be goddamned proud.”

  “You keep them,” Teddy said.

  “Don’t need to. I’m getting out of here soon, aren’t I?” He slid the envelope back. “You get real tired of living your life secondhand. Or thirdhand, as it is.” He turned to me, drumming his fingers excitedly on the table. “So where are we at with the case?”

  “Angela Crowder is the DA. She made an offer. You plead to second-degree murder and the state will agree to recommend a sentence of time served, meaning you walk out of the courtroom a free man. You’d be on parole, so they could always violate you. I told her you wouldn’t take it. The offer’s good until the hearing, though.”

  “They’re bluffing,” Lawrence said.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. What she said is that they’re investigating. It sounds to me like they’re thinking about retrying you. It’s been pointed out to me that the evidence withheld from the defense wasn’t necessarily inconsistent with guilt. I think a lot of judges would have denied Teddy’s petition on that basis.”

  I tried to explain it as succinctly as I could. “All the evidence shows is that Caroline was with another man before her death. It doesn’t show that this other man killed her. In fact, some people might think that it supplies the missing link of motive. You come home in the middle of the day, find her in bed with another man, and in a jealous rage beat her to death.”

  “We got lucky, is what you’re saying. Unbelievable.”

  “There’s also the possibility of an appeal by the state. The court of appeals might look at this one and shrug. Harmless error is what they call it when they think you might be guilty anyway. If the judge denies bail, you might find yourself stuck in here longer than you think. It’s a dirty bargain, making you plead guilty to a crime you didn’t commit, but you’ve got to remember that this mess could drag on for years.”

  “I’m not pleading guilty to anything. They don’t even have probable cause.”

  “Then we’ve got to be ready to bring a bail motion at your hearing. Teddy can handle it. Or I can, if you want.”

  Teddy stirred in his chair, glanced at me. We hadn’t talked about this part. He was still technically the lead attorney on my father’s case, but he hadn’t made a court appearance since before the shooting, and a first-degree murder case wasn’t exactly the place to start.

  My father spoke carefully. “Teddy hasn’t been in front of a judge in over five years.”

  I didn’t say anything. But the expression on my face was enough.

  “Oh, shit, kid. Now you’re going to make me cry. I feel rotten about it. I really do. But it’s my life here. Teddy did his job, now it’s time for you to come in and do what you do.”

  “You’re the alpha dog, now,” Teddy said. “No point beating round the bush.”

  “It’s not a good thing or a bad thing,” Lawrence continued. “It’s just a fact.”

  I nodded. “Okay, I’ll do the hearing. There’s no conflict with that, but you’ll need to find another attorney for the long haul if they don’t drop the case. There isn’t
a better public defender’s office in the country than San Francisco’s.”

  My father nodded. It was settled, then. “What are my chances of making bail?” he wanted to know. “It’s not one of the legal issues I’ve kept up on. It’s not really a factor in my client group.”

  “Decent,” I said. “Let me ask you this. If you do get out, what are your plans?”

  “No such thing as plans in here. Once you start making any, you’re finished for life inside.” He sat back and sighed heavily. “I wouldn’t impose on you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I talked to Dot.”

  He seemed suddenly to become still. “And?”

  “You told me you were going to give her the news, but she had to hear it from me. You can imagine how that made her feel.”

  “I couldn’t do it,” he said woefully. “Every day, I meant to call her, believe me.”

  He seemed truly ashamed, but also helpless and paralyzed by the new possibilities life had opened before him.

  I looked at him with pity and frustration. “What’s wrong with you? She’s clearly devoted to you, and for someone as independent as she seems, that’s saying a lot. What’s she do?”

  “Trauma nurse. She doesn’t like to talk about her work.”

  “So you’re going to act like you don’t believe she’ll honor your engagement if and when you get out? What’s that say about your respect for her?”

  “Sounds like you’re making judgments you’ve got no business making.”

  “You made it my business when you sent me to tell her what you should have told her yourself. She should have been the first person you told.”

  “So what did she say?”

  “What do you mean, what did she say? You think she’s going to talk to me about you and her? She got on her bike and drove off. I followed her. When I finally caught up to her, she was furious.”

  “She isn’t ready for this any more than I am.”

  “No, I don’t suppose she is. But at least she’s willing to face it.”