House Witness

by Mike Lawson

  Ella stood up. “Finish your joint, Curtis, but I expect to hear from you once a day until I tell you otherwise. And if I don’t hear from you … Well, I hear it’s hard to find jobs these days, but I wouldn’t know.”

  As Ella walked back to her car, she couldn’t help thinking that Bill would never have done what she was doing with Esther. That had been one of the problems working with Bill. She’d loved the man dearly, but he didn’t always have the … well, the heart to do the hard things that sometimes had to be done.

  16

  Thirteen years earlier

  Hawaii—January 2003

  Bill and Ella were married on the island of Kauai.

  Bill asked if she wanted her parents to attend the ceremony, and Ella said no. She hadn’t spoken to her parents since she had left Calhoun Falls—and never intended to speak to them again. Bill flew his mother over from Santa Barbara.

  The first thing Bill’s mother said when Bill introduced her to Ella was: “Well, aren’t you just lovely. You’re as pretty as the granddaughter I’ve always wanted.”

  Bill said, “Gimme a break, Mom.”

  But it turned out that Ella actually grew to like Bill’s mother, whose name was Janet Kerns, her last name coming from her fourth husband. She was very attractive and well preserved, although Ella could tell that she’d had a little work done. Her first husband, Bill’s dad, had died not long after Bill was born; the next two husbands she divorced—and the fact that husband number four didn’t come to the wedding made Ella wonder if he was about to become ex–number four. Janet was witty and rather cynical and reminded Ella of herself in many ways, and judging by the way she dressed and the stones on her fingers, she certainly had money. Ella concluded that Bill’s mom had done exactly what Ella had planned to do when she left Calhoun Falls: She’d married a bunch of rich guys, and now lived well because she had.

  For their honeymoon, they took a cruise that started in Honolulu and would cross the Pacific, go through the Panama Canal, and eventually end up in Fort Lauderdale. Bill wanted to see the Panama Canal, although Ella couldn’t imagine why he’d want to see a ditch filled with water. She was, however, excited about the trip, never having been on a cruise ship before, much less traveled first class on one. Bill said that after they got to Lauderdale, they’d bum around the Florida Keys for a while—he particularly liked Key West—then maybe they’d rent a yacht and see the Caribbean Islands. Ella was in seventh heaven; it appeared as if marrying Bill hadn’t been a mistake at all.

  One day, as the cruise ship was crossing the Pacific—Ella couldn’t believe how big the Pacific was; there was nothing in sight of the ship as far as she could see: not another ship, not land, not even a fucking seagull—she said to Bill, “So tell me how you got started doing what you do.”

  “By getting disbarred,” he said.

  “I know, but how’d that happen?”

  He shrugged. “Jury tampering. I was young and stupid and it was only the second case I ever had, and I could see I was going to lose. Well, I didn’t want to lose, so I tried to suborn one of the jurors to end up with a hung jury, and I got caught. I was an idiot.”

  “But that doesn’t explain how you went from being a bad jury tamperer—if that’s even a word—to what you do now.”

  “I was working for a lawyer named George Chavez in San Antonio, who eventually became, I guess you’d say, my agent. George is a bit of a sleazeball. He didn’t care that I tried to fix the jury; he was just upset that I got caught. So he fired me. I mean, he didn’t really want to, he liked me, but a disbarred lawyer wasn’t going to do him much good.

  “A couple months later, I’m working at a place making cold calls trying to sell some bullshit insurance annuity to suckers, and George calls. He says he’s got a case where there are three witnesses—this was the hit-and-run case I told you about—and the only way George was going to win was if the witnesses disappeared or changed their testimony. The client was rich and willing to pay a hundred grand to make that happen, and George had no intention of doing anything illegal himself. So I took the job and the witnesses never testified and George won the case.

  “Six months later—and by then the hundred grand was gone …”

  Ella laughed, “Yeah, I’ll bet.” Even that early in their marriage, she could see how Bill and money parted ways in a hurry.

  “Anyway, George called again and said there was a lawyer in Dallas who had a similar problem to the one George had had in San Antonio, and asked if I was interested. I said maybe, but only if the price was right. I’d decided after the first time that there was no way I was going to risk going to jail for a lousy hundred grand, that if I was going to do this sort of thing, the payoff had to be huge. Without realizing it at the time, I made up some rules, rule number one being I was only going to work cases where the client could afford to pay at least a million.”

  “What were the other rules?”

  “I wasn’t going to do anything involving kids. You know, child molesters, child pornography, any slimy, nasty shit like that. I wasn’t going to do anything where a witness was in any sort of protection program; that was just too risky. If the case involved physical evidence like DNA, fingerprints, ballistics results, or someone caught on a surveillance camera, I’d tell the client’s lawyer up front that I might not be able to help him—but that he’d still have to pay my fee. There’ve been times when I’ve been able to make evidence disappear or make it look like test results have been corrupted, but that’s tough to do. And you need to keep in mind that a lot of times witnesses and evidence don’t have to disappear. The defense just needs enough to create reasonable doubt.” Bill smiled. “I guess you might say that’s who I am: the Creator of Reasonable Doubt.”

  “Have you ever failed?” Ella asked.

  “Sure. Who doesn’t fail? But I’ve succeeded enough that George keeps finding me work.”

  “And how does that happen?”

  “George keeps his eyes open for the right kind of cases, and like I said, the first thing he’s looking for is a client who can afford my fee, and there aren’t many who can. Then he’ll take a look at the client’s lawyer, and see if he or she is the kind of person who will be inclined to hire someone like me. Keep in mind, too, that defense lawyers represent people they know are criminals, and over time they tend to slide over the line themselves, or at least that’s been my experience. And as time’s gone on, like in any business, word gets around. A lawyer I’ve worked with in the past will refer me to a lawyer he knows, and that lawyer will contact George.”

  “How much does George make?”

  “Ten percent, which is a hundred thousand tax-free dollars on a million-dollar fee. Not a bad paycheck for basically being an answering service.”

  “So, how do you do it? How do you get all these witnesses not to testify?”

  “Think about it, Ella. There are only so many ways.”

  She knew she was young and still had a lot to learn, but it continued to irritate her when he tried to turn a discussion into some sort of Socratic teaching session. “Just tell me,” she said.

  Bill shrugged. “Sometimes I make a witness go away before the trial. I get him to take a trip or hide so he’s not available. Or I just pay him to change his testimony, or I find some way to blackmail him or scare him so he’s afraid to tell the truth. Or maybe I find something that makes him a shitty witness, someone whose credibility the defense can attack. I mean, it’s really not that complicated. I just make sure that a witness doesn’t show up for the trial or that if he does show up, he says what the defense wants him to say.”

  “But what do you do when bribery or blackmail doesn’t work?”

  “Hey, look! Dolphins,” Bill said, pointing out at the bright blue sea.

  Time passed, and Ella discovered that marriage to Bill wasn’t perfect. But it was almost perfect.

  When Bill wasn’t working they had a marvelous time. Bill particularly liked taking cruises, and the honeymoon cruise
was the first of many they took in the years they were married. They cruised the planet: the great cities in Europe along the shores of the Mediterranean; Scandinavia, Alaska, Antarctica, the Orient; the rivers of Europe, China, and Russia. Ella Sue Fieldman had never left the state of South Carolina; Ella Fields saw the whole wide world.

  When they traveled, it was always first class—or whatever the category is that’s a step above first class. And Bill loved showing off his hot young wife, who was always dressed to the nines. She had so many clothes that she always had to give some away when they moved to the next city where Bill was working; she’d usually take the clothes she no longer wanted to some battered women’s shelter.

  After they got married, and in between vacations, they lived in Seattle, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Houston, San Diego, and Las Vegas—and in each city they lived in a luxurious apartment or a house, and always a place with a spectacular view. As for his work, Bill took a job every eighteen to twenty-four months. For one thing, he liked to play and had no interest in working more often than that. But the other thing was that there were a limited number of cases in which the ultrarich had committed a crime, and in some cases Bill couldn’t do anything to help the defendant. Like this one dot.com billionaire in San Francisco who killed his lover. The people in the adjacent suite heard the billionaire and his paramour screaming and breaking furniture, and when the police showed up Mr.Dot.com was standing with a butcher knife in his hand and his clothes soaked with blood. There was nothing even Bill could do for an idiot like that.

  But the marriage wasn’t perfect, and the reason it wasn’t—as far as Ella was concerned—was that Bill wasn’t perfect. He was a slob, leaving clothes strewn all over the house; she didn’t think he’d ever put a dish in the dishwasher the whole time they were married. And he was always late; the man owned a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex but it was as if he never bothered to look at it. He was also a sore loser when it came to golf. Ella, after taking the lessons he’d paid for, eventually became a better golfer than he was, and he’d pout for hours when she beat him, so much so that after a while she just let him win. He didn’t get drunk often, but when he did, he’d become belligerent and jealous and might start chest-bumping with some young stud he thought was hitting on Ella.

  But that was just normal married-couple stuff. All the magazines said that married couples fought most often over sex and money. Well, sex wasn’t a problem she and Bill had; they had a great sex life, and Ella made sure it stayed that way. The big problem, the really big problem, was money.

  During the premarriage “serious talk” she’d insisted they have, Ella had found out, as she’d suspected, that when Bill was paid, the money went into offshore accounts, in a complicated enough way to make it hard for the IRS or the cops to trace. And that was okay by Ella, except for the fact that if something happened to Bill, his money would remain in those accounts until the end of time.

  After they were married, Bill, with no argument whatsoever, put her down as a joint holder on all of his accounts—which was good, but which also posed a problem for Ella: If Bill was ever caught, she’d become an accomplice to his crimes just because of the money. But that was a secondary issue, and a risk she was willing to take. The major issue was that Bill drained money out of the accounts as fast as it went in—which, considering the amount he made on each job, was actually a hard thing to do.

  As far as Bill was concerned, another job would always come along, and he was determined to live life to the hilt. He spent money on clothes, cars, restaurants, apartments, and vacations. He was always paying for everyone’s drinks and dinner. And he spent money on her, buying her things she didn’t want or need. He spent fifty thousand dollars once on a necklace that she was afraid to wear and a hundred thousand on a full-length Siberian sable coat. Where the hell would someone wear a full-length Siberian fur coat if she didn’t live in Siberia?

  Then there were the bad investments, essentially get-rich-quick schemes. He invested two million with a Florida developer they met on a cruise. It was a can’t-fail, sure thing, bound to make him twenty or thirty million. Except that he made this investment in 2007 and then the real estate bubble burst, the bottom dropped out of the economy, and the developer couldn’t give away the land in Florida. In 2011, he met a kid in San Diego who convinced Bill that he was going to be the next Steve Jobs—and another million went down the drain.

  Bill was smart enough to know that he couldn’t keep doing what he did forever. He knew that one day he was going to be old and maybe infirm, and that he needed some sort of retirement plan. He also knew that the longer he kept doing what he did, the more likely it was that one day he might get caught and go to jail. He knew, therefore, that it was in his best interest to acquire as much as he could as fast as he could, and then get out of the game for good. Yep, Bill knew all this—but it never changed the way he behaved, no matter how much Ella nagged at him.

  The year after they were married—after the world’s longest honeymoon—Bill took a job in Seattle. The case involved a retired Microsoft executive worth several billion who’d been arrested for sexually assaulting a woman. It was basically a he-said, she-said case. The problem was that there was a witness, a wheelchair-bound woman who lived in the building across the street from the victim’s apartment and spent virtually every waking hour staring into the windows across from her own. The invalid could swear that Mr. Microsoft had torn the victim’s blouse—and disprove that she had torn it herself, as the billionaire claimed she had in an effort to scream rape and extort money from him.

  Bill refused to allow Ella to help him and wouldn’t tell her what he planned to do to get the witness to change her testimony—which she eventually did. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Ella; he was simply trying to protect her. But Ella wanted to be involved, and she was convinced that she could help him. And she was bored. She didn’t have a job and didn’t have anything to do but shop and read and go to spas and the gym. Being practically a newlywed, however, she didn’t assert herself and insist that he include her.

  Everything changed in 2006; they’d been married three years by then. After an extended vacation where they spent eight months in the Bordeaux region of France—Bill briefly considered buying into a winery there, but fortunately Ella was able to talk him out of that—Bill took a job in Phoenix. The first thing Ella did was convince him to increase the amount he charged from one million to two million. Partly she did this because she figured they needed to increase their income, considering the lifestyle that Bill insisted on. The other thing was that, as she pointed out to Bill, his clients could easily afford two million. The ex–Microsoft executive in Seattle had been worth billions, and the guy in Phoenix was a developer and was worth hundreds of millions. So Bill raised his fee and was surprised—although Ella wasn’t—that his new client and the client’s lawyer didn’t have a problem with the higher amount at all.

  The other thing that happened in Phoenix was that Ella started helping him. They’d been married long enough by then that Bill shared everything with her, and so he told her how he intended to deal with the Phoenix case. There were three witnesses to deal with: a single man—a Mexican—and a married couple. Taking care of the Mexican was a piece of cake, but the couple turned out to be a challenge. It was Ella who finally came up with the solution, and although it was elaborate and time-consuming, and took a lot of money, it worked. At the time she couldn’t help thinking it would have been a lot simpler to just burn down the couple’s house with them sleeping in it, but when she mentioned this to Bill, he said, “No way. Two million bucks isn’t worth the price we’ll pay if we get caught, and there’s no statute of limitations on murder.” And that’s when she began to have some doubts about Bill. But she still loved him.

  After Phoenix, she and Bill did the grand tour of the Orient: China, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. They were treated like royalty everyplace they stayed—which wasn’t surprising, considering the rates they paid and the way Bill ov
ertipped. Then Bill reluctantly accepted a job in Minneapolis in 2008, though he wasn’t really ready to go back to work; and besides, Ella thought, who in his right mind would want to spend a winter in Minnesota? It was in Minneapolis that she concluded that Bill, as successful as he’d been in the past, might not really be cut out for the business he was in.

  The case in Minneapolis involved a rich guy, obviously—a direct descendant of a nineteenth-century robber baron—who’d tried to make his wife’s murder look like suicide. What she and Bill needed to do was make one witness disappear or change his testimony, and destroy some evidence sitting in a holding cage in a police station—and both these problems turned out to be really tough.

  Regarding the evidence, there were three cops who had access to the place where it was stored, and it took Bill almost six weeks to figure out which of the three could be bribed and then convince him to cooperate.

  But it was the witness who turned out to be the bigger problem: He couldn’t be bribed, because he was even richer than the defendant. Nor did he have any nasty, disgusting habits that could be used to blackmail him. On top of that, the witness knew the defendant personally and detested the man and was just dying to testify against him—which would result in Bill’s client spending thirty years in Stillwater.

  Bill and Ella looked at a number of options. The witness had a niece, his sister’s daughter, and the niece had a drug problem and wouldn’t be hard to set up to be arrested. They decided in the end, however, that this plan wouldn’t work, because the witness was a prick, wasn’t close to his sister, and wasn’t likely to do anything to help his niece. The next idea Ella had—and it was her idea, not Bill’s—involved the witness’s maid, a good-looking Hispanic girl who resided in the witness’s house and did all the domestic crap for the witness and his spoiled wife. Ella had the idea of paying the girl to testify that the witness had raped her, and then giving the witness a choice: Don’t testify at the trial or go to jail yourself. But when Ella met the maid she concluded that she was dumber than a dust mop, and decided to drop that idea, too.