Invasion of Privacy

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  So she had heard correctly, that day in Collier’s office. Terry had filmed herself dying.

  "It’s only about ten minutes long," Collier said. "Come over this afternoon, if you can. I have a break from court around one o’clock."

  "I’ll be there."

  "We consider it a dying declaration. She says your guy pulled the trigger."

  "I might not accept that idea as easily as you. No matter what she says. But I’d like to see it. I’ll be there this afternoon."

  "Fine. You may change your mind. All I’m saying is, don’t let him bamboozle you. Whatever hold he has on you, fight it. We’re looking into the possibility that he was involved in the Sweet girl’s disappearance. This case has a slippery, nasty quality to it that I don’t like. He’s a very dangerous, unpredictable man, Nina. I’m glad there’s glass between you and him at the jail."

  "The situation’s under control," Nina said. "Don’t be such a worrier, Collier."

  He moved to the door, his hand on the knob for what seemed like minutes. Then he turned back to face her. "My wife used to say that," he said, twisting the knob and leaving without saying good-bye.

  She found Paul sprawled in a chair in the outer office, hands in the pockets of his beige chinos, his blond hair ruffled up like a rooster’s, dark rectangles shading his eyes.

  "My eleven-thirty?" she said to Sandy.

  "He was hoping you could fit him in." Sandy continued her stapling, her broad brown face as stoic as an Easter Island statue. She might have been making a joke. It was impossible to tell, because she didn’t give out the usual helper cue, a smile. Nina couldn’t recall ever seeing her laugh.

  "I’m so happy to see you, I’ll even buy you lunch. Come on in," she said. "What are you doing here?" He followed her in and closed the door firmly.

  "A birdie summoned me," he said. "I’m here to work for you, if you haven’t already made other arrangements."

  "You’re going to help me with Kurt?" How off-balance she must have been feeling. In an instant she felt steadier. "Thank goodness.’’

  "Not that you couldn’t handle it without me."

  "Goes without saying." He bestowed a crooked smile on her, acknowledging the slight tone of reproof in her voice.

  "Where do we start?"

  "You sounded so definite. I didn’t let myself hope. What changed your mind, Paul?"

  "Like I said. A. birdie. A large birdie in tennis shoes, with a sharp tongue. Called yesterday and said she was coming down to Carmel to beat the crap out of me. Either that, or I help you. Actually, she didn’t use exactly those words, but the intent was clear."

  "Sandy."

  "Sandy."

  "I had nothing to do with it. I’ll talk to her—"

  "Don’t bother. Talking to her is like talking to a lava flow. Besides, she was right. It didn’t take long to shame me into agreeing to come up."

  "Wonderful! You’re staying at Caesars?"

  "As usual."

  Nina reached into her briefcase and handed him the police reports on Kurt’s arrest. "Read these. That is, if you can start right away?"

  "I’m all yours. I just finished a job for Solly Lazar. He owns a Mexican restaurant in Monterey. Took exactly two days."

  "That’s fast."

  "His employee was perfectly happy to tell me his recipe for cooking books. A five-minute job. Then we worked on just desserts."

  She laughed. She would not inquire further. Sometimes, she didn’t want to know. "You can get people to open up. It’s one of your strong points."

  "Doesn’t work so well with you."

  Giving in to impulse, she put her arms around him in a heartfelt hug. "You’re a good guy, Mr. van Wagoner. With you on our side, we can win."

  "It’s for you, Nina. Not him." Paul was so wonderfully uncomplicated. He said what he felt.

  "I know."

  "I’ll go outside to read these. Then what?"

  "Then we have an appointment to watch a tape."

  Paul drove his van, and Nina the Bronco. Nina arrived at the courthouse complex first. "I’m not looking forward to this," she said, rising from her bench as he came bounding up the steps.

  He took her by the arm, and they walked heavily, like an old couple who had been married forever, through the thick glass doors.

  By the time they reached Collier’s office, Nina and Paul weren’t touching each other. Paul’s sunglasses had gone into his jacket pocket. Nina, lost in her thoughts, hadn’t said much, and Paul didn’t seem to mind.

  Collier came out to meet them. He gave Nina a touch on the shoulder, shook hands with Paul, and sat them down in two chairs squeezed between file cabinets in his office.

  Nina found herself quite interested in watching Paul and Collier measure each other. Paul, too big for the little chair, moved it back to give himself legroom, instigating a polite invasion of the other man’s territory. His body looked relaxed but ready for anything. His eyes moved curiously around, frank in his physical appraisal of the setting and the other man.

  Collier, standing in front of his desk rather than sitting down, maintained a position of superiority, using the moment to make more circumspect but, Nina knew, no less acute observations about Paul.

  She was drawing. She looked down at her yellow pad. Two toucans, beak to beak. Hastily she folded the sheet up so they wouldn’t see it.

  "Thanks for setting this up, Collier. You could have made us wait. And I know it’s not easy for you to take the time," she said.

  "As I mentioned, Nina, the certified copy hasn’t been prepared yet. I’m showing you the original."

  "Isn’t that a little risky?" asked Paul. "I mean, video can be easily damaged."

  "I’ll take that risk in order to dispose of this case promptly."

  His words, his whole manner, sympathetic yet so very self-assured, stepped up Nina’s anxiety.

  "I won’t make you wait long to make up your own mind," he said. His face assumed a look of unpleasant expectation, as if preparing for a bitter drink. "There are a couple of things I should tell you before we watch it. Nina, I know the victim was your client for a while there ..."

  "I’m as prepared as I’ll ever be, Collier. I know from the police report that the camera caught her dying."

  "It’s bad, Nina."

  "Fill me in here," said Paul. "This film shows her death, that I get. But who filmed her?"

  "The video camera, really just a camcorder, must have been knocked to the floor during a struggle. Looks like she managed to press the button somehow to record. No fingerprints, just smears. Like she used her toes."

  Nina steeled herself against the nerves she felt quivering beneath her skin. She was remembering Terry on her studio floor. Yes, the camera had been close, trained on her. Her yellow eyes, and her head lying so peacefully on the bloody pillow ... It had taken time for her to die.

  In the same dispassionate tone Collier had adopted, Paul asked, "Was there sound?"

  "That’s what I wanted to mention," said Collier. "There’s a soundtrack. But the bullet damaged her vocal cords."

  "You mean she doesn’t say anything about Kurt?"

  "I mean, she tries to speak."

  The words hung heavily in the stuffy air. They were using the present tense, she noticed with shock. Terry lived on in her video.

  "What I’m asking is, you want me to keep the sound off while I run the tape this time? You can play it another time, when you get your copy."

  Paul said, "Nina?"

  She ought to receive the full impact, the way a jury would. After she had seen and heard it a thousand times, it would be just another piece of physical evidence.

  And Collier wouldn’t talk to a male defense attorney this way, would he? Trying to spare his feelings? "Let’s hear it," she said.

  "Up to you," Collier said. "She raises her head and tries to talk, but she can’t. So she forms words. We got help from a mostly retired guy who used to work for the county health department, Willie Evans. He’s deaf,
and considered an expert lip-reader. He’s helped us before. He gave us a transcript of what she’s trying to say." He handed Nina and Paul separate copies of a one-page typewritten document. "You can follow her on the video. She’s trying hard to communicate."

  "How long is it?" Nina asked. "The tape?" She remembered staring at the clock above the teacher’s head in school. Sometimes it helped to know.

  "She gives up after eleven minutes or so." He motioned toward his office door. "Shall we?"

  In the dark of a conference room, blinds down, Nina and Collier sat on one side of the long table, Paul on the other. A sheriff’s deputy struggled with a rolling cart, plugged in some wires, punched some controls, nodded to Collier, and departed the room, softly pulling the door shut behind him.

  From a speaker in the corner, silence preceded a loud hiss, which abruptly cut out as the picture came in.

  The autofocus mechanism on the camera seemed unable to decide what to focus on. It shifted out to the patterned floor, threads of clothing, a hand, a foot.

  Sounds like a potato sack being dragged across a floor and bumping into things accompanied the abstract visuals, which slowly resolved themselves into one horrible shot.

  Terry London, her long, wavy reddish hair matted with blood, stared into the camera’s eye. Propped along the cabinets that lined her studio, her legs extending beyond the camera, she looked straight at Nina. And blinked.

  Her legs, spread-eagled in front of her to accommodate the camera, took up the bottom part of the frame. Her body, heaving in breaths with mighty effort, made up the midsection. Her head absorbed the top third of the frame, defiled by a bold red necklace of blood. Looking down toward the camera on the floor, she opened her mouth.

  A woman’s scream, loud and harrowing, choking and wretched, tore through the room. Collier leaped up, stepping around Nina. "Let me just get the volume ..." he murmured, scrambling for the controller on the table near the machine. He pushed a button, lowering the level slightly, blocking Nina’s path to the screen for a moment, jolting her away from its searing image. "Sorry about that," he said, his voice apologetic as he made his way back to his chair, controller firmly in hand.

  Rhythm, a mechanical wheezing, started up as Terry continued to look directly into the camera. Sucking and wet, the sounds pulsed from the speaker. For a moment Nina thought there was something else wrong, and glanced behind to Collier to see if he needed to fix anything. His eyes were glued to the screen. She realized there would be no further reprieve and turned back to Terry.

  Terry opened her mouth with a pop, to break the bubble of blood that formed when she separated her lips. She closed and opened it once again, her mouth twisting and horrible, as she attempted something she had always done before and would never do again.

  Drowning in her own blood, she looked down at the red that increasingly filled the middle of the screen, that had grown and spread as blood from the wound in her neck flowed out of her, pooling on the floor below.

  "This is where the transcript starts," Collier said quietly in the Boschian darkness.

  "It doesn’t hurt." Paul read the words from the transcript laid out on the table, a small penlight illuminating them. The sounds Terry made, carefully mouthed, were unintelligible.

  "I’m dying," she said next, and her lips trembled with the enormity of understanding that must have flooded her then. The words, read by Paul with no more emphasis than "Good morning," or "Hello," spoke so neutrally of her ending. Nina felt her feet pushing her chair back, as if reacting to acceleration, braking, trying to slow things down, keep her alive.

  Terry’s face rose toward the camera. Blood streamed out of her neck, obscuring the bullet hole. No one could help her now, her face said. Help.

  Then:

  "It’s your fault, Kurt."

  Gasping and rattling.

  "Oh, oh. I’m dying."

  Paul’s voice followed Terry out loud, like a singer lip-synching a song.

  Mouthing each syllable while the rest of her face twisted with pained grimaces, she wove her head slightly back and forth, as if she were rocking to soothe herself, like a child rocking itself to sleep, long past the time for a cradle.

  The red of her blood, the blue of her clothing, and the checks on the floor combined with lamplight from a gooseneck lamp on the counter above to give the scene a fantastic, lurid artfulness. Staged, aesthetically sensational, Nina thought. Video lacked the distance of film, the framing, the soft faraway beauty of it. She could be lying right here in this conference room, in real time, breathing. Dying.

  Terry hiccuped blood. Her head fell. For a long spell, maybe minutes, all they could see was her head, the neat parting of her hair along the top of her skull. But they could still hear the breathing. Nina looked away for a moment toward Paul, who sat across the table from her. He leaned an elbow on his knee. His chin rested on his fist. She couldn’t see his face. From the back, he had the uncomfortably restive air of a man watching the strike count rise on a pro baseball game, or an action movie seconds before the bomb blast he knew was coming.

  Nina turned back. Terry struggled to raise her face higher.

  "You ... pulled the trigger."

  She nodded several times. How could her body produce those tears at such a time?

  She seemed to shake her wobbly head. She strained to turn her face, now mottled with blood, to one side, toward the doorway Nina knew was there, as if she saw a ghost there, outside the camera range. Turning back, she showed her teeth in a caricature of a smile.

  "What a ... surprise ... the Angel of Death."

  Then ...

  "I’ll see you in hell...."

  Her mouth closed. An indescribable, strangled cough took up a long breath. Tears mixed with blood on her face. She shaped her lips, her head still straining to the side, her eyes staring. "Oh," she said. "Oh, oh ..."

  Her head fell, as if in surrender. Her body stilled. The screen blinked off.

  "That’s all," said Collier. "She’s dead at this point."

  "Poor woman," Nina said. She was thinking about Collier’s wife, wondering how Collier privately felt when he watched the video. "She really seemed to see the Angel of Death coming toward her."

  "Maybe that’s why she turned off the film at the end, with a kind of modesty," Collier said.

  Paul said, "Some say you can see the soul come out from between the eyebrows at the precise moment. I’ve never seen it. Now, that would be the ultimate invasion of privacy."

  "I need some fresh air," Nina said. They all got up quickly and left the dark room, where Terry could still move and speak, back from that lonely place to the throngs of the living.

  20

  "DYING DECLARATIONS," NINA SAID, THUMBING through the evidence code. "Exception to the hearsay rule. Here it is, section 1242:

  " ’Evidence of a statement made by a dying person respecting the cause and circumstances of his death is not made inadmissible by the hearsay rule if the statement was made upon his personal knowledge and under a sense of immediately impending death.’ "

  Two file boxes of discovery materials cluttered up Nina’s desk.

  "So the video of her dying is admissible as evidence," Paul said. "I guess you could argue that they doctored it somehow."

  "Chain of custody is pretty tight in this case. Collier’s very careful, and keeps a close eye on his troops."

  "Collier? Getting a bit cozy with the deputy D.A., are we?"

  Sandy harrumphed from the other side of Nina’s door. Paul opened it, and she sailed in bearing burritos from the Mexican restaurant across the street and two cans of soda. Taking in the atmosphere, she said simply, "Lunch."

  "Mmm," Paul said, picking up a plastic spoon. "Chile Colorado."

  "You’d eat through a nuclear bomb."

  "If you put a touch of pepper on it, I’ll take care of that for you too," said Paul.

  "A nuclear bomb?"

  "I think he’s talking about this." Sandy held out a gooey quesadilla on
a plate.

  Paul unwrapped foil paper from his burrito. The aroma of cumin and beans instantly permeated the room. "I see something like that video, and my reaction is, well, thank the Lord, I’m still among the living. And I become very hungry. It’s an instinctive thing. It started when I was working homicide in San Francisco. We all went out at night and ate these huge meals." He took a big bite.

  Sandy sat down in a chair by the door and ate daintily from a paper plate. She was wearing muddy rubber boots and a flowered jumper, her short black hair damp from the rain and her bracelets clinking on her wrists. Another afternoon thunderstorm had come up and thick drops pounded on the windowpanes from a dark May sky.

  "Give me one of those, Paul," Nina said.

  "Keep the paper wrapped on the bottom so you don’t drip all over yourself."

  "I know how to eat a burrito!"

  "Life may be short, and it may be brutish, but we’re still here. It’s always the other guy until your time’s up. Then, who cares? Not you. Or so I used to tell myself." He ate quickly, standing up, as she was.

  "What a dreadful way to die."

  "Shot, and left like that?"

  "I don’t mean that. I mean telling lies when there’s no longer a point, when it’s so incredible to believe she’d lie that the Evidence Code will let the lie in as evidence."

  "Have a taco," Paul said. "It’ll settle you down. But sit, okay? I’m just waiting for you to dump it."

  Nina’s hands shook. Her mind had been objective, but her body had reacted to the video.

  "She lied, Paul. Kurt didn’t kill her." She popped the cap on her soda and picked a taco from the bag. "You didn’t believe her, did you? She hated him. He’d rejected her for the last time. Even lying there on the floor dying, she thought of nothing more than hurting him."

  "The jury ain’t gonna like it." Paul wiped his mouth on a napkin, burped, excused himself, and pulled a small notebook from his pocket, sitting on a chair across from her desk.

  Sandy had finished eating. She bagged up some trash and went back to her own desk, leaving the door open just a crack behind her.

  "You need an expert witness," Paul went on, "a lip-reader who can do better than Willie. That’s your only chance. I used to know a guy from the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley who might be able to help. I’ll give him a call."