Fox is Framed

by Lachlan Smith

  “Just gathering background information.”

  Nina used Shanahan to run through the facts of the old case, getting him to confirm that Eric had been the star witness, the one to identify Bell as the kidnapper. She also established that Gainer had recanted his testimony after Bell’s conviction was overturned, resulting in the DA’s being unable to retry him.

  “You obtained ‘background information’ about Bell’s case from Ms. Crowder because you believed there might be a connection between the murder of Russell Bell and that old case, correct?”

  Shanahan hesitated. “You always want to check those things out.”

  “And what, if anything, did you determine?”

  “That there was no connection.”

  “At any point in your investigation, did you learn that Eric Gainer had recently been in contact with Lucy Rivera, the victim in that old case?”

  During the break, I’d quickly briefed Nina on the results of my investigation so far. She’d been furious with me for not sharing my discoveries earlier. That she was running with this new information now was an indication of how precarious she believed our defense was.

  “I didn’t learn anything like that, no.”

  “So you didn’t learn Eric Gainer had been blackmailed regarding Ms. Rivera?”

  Shanahan’s expression changed to one of repugnance. “No. I never heard that.”

  Crowder’s objection and Shanahan’s answer came at the same time, and Judge Liu instructed the jurors to disregard the question. But my theory of our defense to Russell Bell’s murder was before the jurors, out in the open at last. So far Nina had done everything she needed to do with this witness. The question was whether it would be enough.

  After another strong admonishment from Judge Liu, Nina continued. “Sitting here today, you can’t tell me that Eric Gainer hadn’t come to regret his decision to recant his former testimony and employ Russell Bell, correct?”

  “As I’ve told you, I wasn’t able to speak with him.”

  “Detective, I want to be crystal clear. You refuse to interview Eric Gainer in the presence of his lawyer to see if he might have had a motive to murder Russell Bell.”

  “That’s up to his lawyer,” Shanahan said. “I’m ready to go anytime.”

  “And the reason you haven’t insisted on conducting that interview is because you don’t want to do anything that might jeopardize your theory that my client, and not Eric Gainer or someone close to him, murdered Russell Bell.”

  Shanahan didn’t answer immediately. Astutely, Nina didn’t press, deciding instead to let the question hang in the air unanswered. She was turning toward the defense table without receiving a response when the detective spoke to her back. “I’ll ask him one more time to come in for an interview if you want. Is that really what you want, Counselor?”

  She froze, seeming to realize that she’d overplayed her hand. She recovered quickly and turned with renewed attack. “Don’t you feel it’s a little late in the day to propose such a fundamental step in your investigation?”

  “No, because it’ll be a waste of time.”

  “You mean because Eric Gainer is likely to assert his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refuse to answer your questions?”

  Shanahan saw his mistake, but it was too late to backtrack. “Anything’s possible.”

  “No further questions.”

  Chapter 21

  Nina had succeeded in planting the barest seeds of Eric Gainer’s guilt in the jury’s mind, but seeds were all they were. After court, we all went back to her office. During the cab ride I didn’t try to talk to her about what had happened, seeing by the pained look on her face that consolation, especially from me, would only set her teeth on edge. I wanted to tell her she’d done the only thing she could after my father dropped his bombshell and then stuck his foot in his mouth. But I knew it wouldn’t help.

  “Can I talk to you?” I said when we arrived at her building. She nodded and we went into her office. She dumped her file box on the desk and began rummaging impatiently inside it, searching for something that seemingly wasn’t there. I told her what Eric had said about planning to testify that Russell Bell had told him that my father had threatened and blackmailed him.

  She shrugged, obviously furious with me but too preoccupied with the events of today and the challenges of tomorrow to deal with that now. “I’m not going to let this change how I handle Eric, if they call him. As things are going now, Crowder could afford not to call him and still win. I wouldn’t risk it, if I were her, especially now that I’ve tipped my hand about intending to introduce that picture from the paper. So my attitude has to be that we have nothing to lose.”

  Nina ran through her plan, which was to force Eric to choose whether to shelter behind the Fifth Amendment, or explain the sordid mess Russell Bell had made of the semi-heroic act that had launched his career. “And he’ll confess, I’m sure, and then they’ll roll the credits.”

  Teddy was waiting in the conference room for me to drive him back to Berkeley. My father and Dot had already gone. But Teddy could just as easily take the BART home as catch a ride with me. I asked Nina if she wanted me to stay and help her prepare for tomorrow.

  “No,” she said, her voice becoming a shade warmer than usual. “You’ve been a tremendous help. I would never have been so well prepared without you. What happened today wasn’t your fault. In the heat of the moment, looking for someone to blame, I lashed out at you, but that was wrong of me. You’re a fine lawyer, Leo, and I’d gladly try a case with you again. But now we’re coming into the final push. You’re a cyclist, aren’t you? I know a little bit about the sport. At some point in the big races, the support riders peel off, and ultimately the leader has to go on alone. I need to turn my attention to our closing argument, and that’s a mountain I’ll need to climb without your help. You’d only be a distraction if you stayed. And besides, you need to get Dot ready. We can’t forget to put on our alibi witness.”

  I didn’t mind Nina’s thinking of me as a distraction. So I got my pickup out of the parking deck and drove Teddy home.

  Talking to her, I’d come to realize what I’d suspected all along—that I never again wished to play the role of bystander in a criminal trial. I didn’t want my heart rate tracking another lawyer’s examinations, the questions I would have asked constantly leaping to my throat. To be fair, her courtroom performance had been first-rate. She’d leapt into openings I’d have missed, and she’d missed few opportunities to turn the state’s evidence in our favor. She’d made judgment calls when she’d needed to make them, and I couldn’t argue with her attempt to turn Bell’s death to our purposes. She’d had to make that bet.

  I dropped Teddy at his house. Tamara and the baby had been back there since early afternoon. Jeanie was with them. They’d picked up Chinese takeout, and I shared it with them, eating on the couch in front of the TV. Jeanie wanted to hear how the trial had gone today, but neither Teddy nor I was in any mood to talk about it. When the food was gone, I drove home.

  ~ ~ ~

  I called Dot’s number, spoke briefly to my father, then asked him to put Dot on the line. We ran through her brief examination several times. Before today, Nina hadn’t planned to call her to testify, but now we had no choice. Nina was dead set against returning my father to the stand and exposing him to another round of cross-examination. That left Dot to testify regarding his whereabouts the morning of the murder. We would also be using her as a character witness, asking her to testify to my father’s gentle nature during the time they’d been engaged.

  After I finished with Dot, I meant to go to bed early. But then Tanya called around eleven. “You’re in luck,” she said. “Sherrie was suspicious at first, but I talked her into it. I told her your regular girl was out of town and someone had recommended her. Only the price is going to be eight hundred.”

 
The address Tanya gave me was a six-story apartment building in the Sunset, three blocks from Ocean Beach. When I got there, I went up the steps and punched in the apartment number to the intercom. The door buzzed and I went in.

  I took the elevator up. The fourth floor was divided into three apartments, one in front and two in back. The door to the front one was ajar. Light spilled into the hallway.

  “I told you not to look for me,” a jaded voice said.

  She was sitting on a low armchair. The light came from a lamp beside her. Her legs were crossed in fishnets and a short skirt, and she wore a push-up top beneath a denim jacket. Her hair was blond, brushed severely back. She was still beautiful, but I saw the lines of strain that had formed in her cheeks. She was expensively dressed and looked very different from the person I’d driven to Mendocino and back. Unmistakably, however, it was her.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I know it was a cheap trick, getting you to come here, but I had to see you again.”

  She glanced around the room. “What you pulled tonight is just what Russell did. She hadn’t even heard about him getting out of prison. No one bothered to tell her. So she walked into a trap.”

  Her stare was intense. At the back of my neck I felt a prickling sensation. Eric had never seen the body, according to what he’d told me. He didn’t know which girl had fallen from the railing and which one had survived, which was the victim and which one had set him up. “You’re Lucy,” an instinct made me say. “You leaked that picture to the paper. Eric thought you were dead, but you’re the one who’s been blackmailing him.”

  She uncrossed her legs and leaned back, pressing her arms beneath her small breasts. “Lucy’s dead, just like I told you. Russell Bell killed her. That’s how it has to be. What did you want to see me for? Not for a fuck, I hope.”

  I came into the room and sat in the matching armchair next to hers. She put a hand on my leg and leaned over the arm of her chair onto mine. I felt a wave of heat go through me, triggered by the scent of her perfume. It was like she’d flipped a switch; sex was suddenly thick in the air. “Listen to me. I think Jackson Gainer had Russell killed to cover up Lucy’s murder. Eric’s protecting him.” If she hadn’t killed Russell, that is. The possibility suddenly presented itself to me, so obvious now that I knew who she was. Because who had a better motive than she did?

  “That’s because Eric Gainer knows he could never pick up a gun, pump bullets into a man.” She sighted along an imaginary gun, pumped the arm four times as if with the effect of a weapon’s recoil. “He’s the kind that keeps his back turned while others are doing the dirty work.”

  Everything clicked into place, the possibility becoming more certain. I chose to test it. “I’d love to have seen the look in Russell’s eyes when Lucy shot him.” My eyes went to the small purse she clutched under her arm. Inside, I guessed, might be the gun that had killed Russell Bell. The key to my father’s freedom, if I’d been a cop, and if this new suspicion was correct. My heart raced at the thought that the answer, at last, might be at hand.

  She rose, her hand on the purse toying with the zipper, and began to pace the room. She could have the gun out in an instant, if it was in there. “Lucy didn’t shoot Bell,” she said. “I was going to do it for her, but someone got to him before I did. I guess Jackson decided he’d rather kill him than pay him. I was going to shoot him after he got paid, not before.” She stopped and turned, her eyes sliding off every surface, flitting away from me. “What would be the point of that?”

  She went on, pacing again. “Lucy was like Eric, in a way. She always counted on her friends to be strong for her. But unlike Eric Gainer, she always chose the wrong friends, ones that took advantage of her. This time was no different. I was never Lucy’s friend, though I pretended to be. Actually, I hated her. I just hated Russell Bell more.”

  She stopped before me, looking down as if daring me to contradict her. I supposed the idea was that the repetition of the sexual torture and abuse she’d endured in her childhood had fractured her personality into at least two discordant pieces. Then she’d snapped and given Bell the justice he deserved, a justice that the legal system had been unable or unwilling to deliver. Maybe that’s what had happened. The trouble was I couldn’t read her. I was no psychologist, but I was under the impression that science had debunked the idea that any such thing as multiple personality disorder truly existed outside the sufferer’s imagination.

  I held up my hands. “You want Gainer. Right now you’re biding your time, but the chance you’re waiting for isn’t going to come. He’s surrounded by lawyers. They’ve got their stories matched. Eric thinks he’s protecting Jackson and Jackson’s protecting him. Right now, the element of surprise is on your side. According to Eric, Russell told him that he stashed the body in the freezer downstairs at Chen’s house. Eric doesn’t know the body isn’t yours.”

  She turned midpace and stared at me with dawning comprehension. “You’re trying to set me up. Your father’s on trial for murder and you want me to confess to something I didn’t do, so that you can blame me instead of him.”

  “No,” I told her. “I haven’t been able to put the right kind of pressure on Gainer. Moral pressure, I mean. That’s the only kind a man like Eric is susceptible to. Russell killed you, he thinks, and he’s convinced that Jackson killed Russell. If you surprised him, you could put the right kind of pressure on him, get him to tell the truth about what he thinks Jackson did. If he did that, then my father would be off the hook. And so would Lucy.”

  “Moral pressure? Eric Gainer? Are you kidding me? The man doesn’t have a moral bone in his body. And your father’s the son of a bitch who got Russell out of prison.”

  She was working herself up to something.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you,” I said, seeing the danger I was in. I needed to cut this short now and get out of there.

  “I wish you were sorry.” Her hand was still on the bag’s zipper.

  “I’m going,” I said, moving toward the door, not turning my back to her. Then I was through it, and I let out my held breath. I didn’t wait for the elevator, but hurried down the stairs two at a time and out to the street. When I looked up, she was at the window, staring down.

  I was home after two, and slightly closer to an answer than I’d been before tonight, now that I knew that Lucy Rivera was alive. What I didn’t know was whether she’d killed Russell or merely been victimized by him again. Rather than go over and over in my mind what I’d just seen and heard, I spent the hours between 2:00 and 4:00 am in front of my computer trying to focus on making an outline for Nina to rely on in her examination of Eric Gainer.

  Chapter 22

  “Are we ready to bring the jury in?” Judge Liu asked as Crowder pushed through the swinging gate, dropping her file box with a thud on the chair where Shanahan would normally be sitting. She was late, and we’d all been waiting in the silent courtroom for ten minutes. Where was her lead detective, I wondered. And what about Eric Gainer? He could be upstairs waiting in the DA’s office—but if they planned to call him as their first rebuttal witness, he ought to be visible now.

  “Your Honor, if I could just have a minute to confer with Ms. Schuyler. The state has a proposal for a plea bargain.”

  Liu blinked in surprise. It was a shocking development. The balance of the trial had appeared to have been tipped in the state’s favor. Until this minute. “Use the jury room. Take the time you need, but no more than fifteen minutes,” Liu admonished. “We’ve kept these jurors waiting long enough.”

  Nina shot me a glance. I touched Teddy’s arm and we went through the swinging door into the well of the courtroom, followed closely by Dot. I put a hand on my father’s shoulder. Through the fabric of his suit I could almost feel his anxiety. I let Crowder go first, then we filed into the windowless jury room with its conference table and dozen chairs. Nina sat in the chair at the head of the table a
nd leaned back, apparently without expectations. The toll of the trial showed around her eyes. The rest of us and Crowder remained standing.

  “Here’s the offer,” Crowder said. She too looked exhausted. “Second-degree murder, conditional plea for time served, you walk out of here today.”

  “What about Bell?” Nina asked, her posture betraying neither surprise nor appreciation, just the fatalism of a lawyer nearing the end of a hard-fought trial. “We’d need a nonprosecution agreement.”

  Crowder shook her head. “Not gonna happen. He has to take his chances.” It crossed my mind that it might be a trick, that they were hoping to get Lawrence to plead guilty to killing my mother as a means of building up the case against him for murdering Russell, establishing motive beyond a doubt. If I’d been the DA on my father’s case, I’d have gone for the jugular. I wouldn’t have been offering any kind of deal today.

  Whatever it was that had brought about this softening in the DA’s position, Crowder wasn’t telling. “I’ll leave you to talk it over,” she said to Nina. “I’m sure you know that I’m fully prepared to press forward. This is from over my head.”

  I speculated this could mean Jackson Gainer had leaned on someone in the DA’s office, and Crowder had been told she needed to offer Maxwell a plea to protect Eric Gainer from being called as a witness, but speculation was all it was.

  Or maybe my visit to Eric had achieved more of an effect than I’d realized.

  “Five minutes,” Nina told her, at which point Crowder left us there, wondering.

  “She must have heard something that worries her from Eric Gainer,” I said. Nina just shrugged. I recognized her indifference for what it was, a lawyer’s recognition that only one consideration mattered now, whether to take the deal or reject it. The backstory was irrelevant.

  “With a conviction on my record, I wouldn’t be able to get my law license back,” Lawrence said. “I wouldn’t be employable.”