Hardy 11 - Suspect, The

by John Lescroart

  "Hey!" Farrell jumped. "Bart wasn't a dog. He was a person."

  Gina gave him a tolerant smile. "My point exactly."

  "How old is she?" Hardy asked. "The daughter?"

  "Eighteen. Just started college up in Oregon. Was fighting with her mother when she left and hadn't patched it up."

  "There's thirty happy years of therapy," Farrell said, "and that's if her dad didn't do it." This time he threw a quick glance at Gina. "And that's if her dad didn't do it," he repeated.

  Gina returned his look with one of her own.

  "I think, in his own subtle way," Hardy put in, "Wes is asking how you're feeling about your client's chances."

  "Not exactly, Diz." Farrell pulled himself up to something resembling a normal posture, turned slightly to face Gina head-on. "I'm asking if your gut is telling you he's guilty or not."

  Gina's face grew pensive. "My brain, the jury's still way out. It's too early."

  Farrell pressed. "I didn't say brain."

  "No, I know." She paused for a moment, took a small breath. "I guess at this point my gut wants to believe he didn't do it."

  Farrell looked over to Hardy. "Told you."

  "And," Gina went on, "now you're going to tell me how stupid and dangerous that is. Which I'm aware of. So." She addressed both of her partners. "What am I supposed to do, then? Not defend him?"

  "No," Wes said. "Not believe him."

  "I don't believe him or not believe him, Wes. I said that in my brain, the jury is still out. It's just the old sentimental slob in me wants to believe that sometimes men who are accused of killing their wives didn't do it. And especially men who write beautiful books about the wilderness and other issues close to my own heart."

  Wes, whose own early legal career had been transformed by an extremely high-profile case where he'd won an acquittal for a friend and colleague whose protestations of innocence he'd believed and who'd turned out to be guilty, shook his head sadly. "Some people think the Marquis de Sade wrote beautiful books too," he said.

  Hardy reached out and put a quick restraining hand on Farrell's knee. "She gets it, Wes. Really." Then, to Gina, "He doesn't want anybody to have to go through what he did. He's just trying to be protective."

  Physically, Gina Roake was probably the strongest woman she knew. Three years before, she had shot and killed a man in a gun-fight. Now her stare had hardened. "I don't need to be protected," she said. "You both should know that by now."

  "That's not the kind of protection I'm talking about," Farrell said. "I'm just telling you that if this goes to a full murder one trial, it's going to be your life for the next year or more. You're going to start to care about this guy, whether or not he's guilty, and I'm just giving you some friendly advice, based on my own experience, that you might feel better when it's over if you decide right at the beginning that he did it and work on that assumption."

  "I've never defended an innocent client in my life, Wes. I'm down with the drill."

  "Good." Farrell got himself upright. "Then there's nothing to worry about, and Diz and I are off to a gala luncheon at Lou's. Would you care to join us?"

  Gina shook her head. "I just ate there yesterday. Once a week is my limit."

  11

  "What are you doing?"

  "When?"

  "Right now."

  "Nothing. I just woke up from a nap. Did you hear again from Juhle?"

  "Not yet, which we can take as a good sign."

  "Actually, I was just looking at an old AARP magazine somebody left here in the room, taking a quiz on how much I know about Michael Douglas."

  "How're you doing on it?"

  "Not too good. He's not married to Annette Bening?"

  "Nope. That's Warren Beatty. Michael Douglas is Catherine Zeta-Jones."

  "Get out of here. He doesn't look anything like her."

  "His wife, Stuart. His wife is Catherine Zeta-Jones."

  "I knew what you were saying. But then who's his famous father?"

  "Here's a hint. Same last name."

  "I don't know. John? Peter? Toby? Ryan?"

  "The famous Toby Douglas?"

  "Stephen? Isn't there a Stephen Douglas?"

  "He debated Lincoln, so that's not it. How about Kirk?"

  "Kirk Douglas! He's not old enough to be Michael's father, is he?"

  "Must be, since he is. Or was. Any more Michael Douglas questions you didn't get?"

  "Co-star in his first hit movie. I don't even know the movie."

  "Romancing the Stone. Kathleen Turner was the co-star."

  "Man. Do you know this much about the law?"

  "At least. Possibly more. Some of it in Latin, even."

  "Okay, then. I'm starting to feel better about you being my lawyer."

  "Thanks so much," Gina said. "Is Kym with you?"

  "No."

  "Okay. What about Debra?"

  "What about her?"

  "I asked first."

  "She went home after lunch when I said I needed to get some sleep."

  "You get enough?"

  "Couple of hours, at least so I'll make it through till tonight."

  "So, you want to go out?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean leave your room, get some air, take a walk? I could be there in fifteen minutes."

  "And do what?"

  "Talk."

  "About what? More of all this?"

  "Basically. You. Caryn. Stuff."

  "Haven't we done enough of that today already?"

  "Frankly, not even close."

  "I'd want to be back here for when Kym gets back."

  "That ought to be possible. You know, for a guy who's doing nothing anyway, you're making this decision harder than it has to be. I'm talking a walk, a chat, we go wild, maybe a latte. Low risk."

  "You can be here in fifteen minutes?"

  "Or less."

  "All right. I'll be ready."

  The two girls used to do a lot of things together, but they'd drifted apart in the past couple of years. Bethany, a highly strung over-achiever, found that she didn't have the energy after her homework and other activities to keep up with Kymberly and her extreme mood swings. When Kymberly was down in the dumps, she was a total drag, often even talking about suicide, and then nodding off if they were trying to do quieter things together, such as studying or baking cookies, or just hanging out. On the other hand, when she was happy, she was recklessly crazy, invincible and immortal, and this was even harder to take—stealing things, making out with guys she didn't even know, doing drugs.

  It got so that the only times they could get along easily was when they both were on a hill, skiing or boarding, and even then it was usually Stuart's presence with them that had made them comfortable. He was daredevil enough for his daughter, and controlled enough for Bethany. When the three of them were together, there was lots of action but he'd draw the line when Kymberly wanted them all to, say, ski off a cliff. But by now even those good times were a couple of years in the past, so Bethany was a bit surprised when Kymberly found her on campus at Galileo High School during lunchtime, just walked up to her as she was talking to some of her friends.

  "Hey, can we talk a minute?"

  "Oh God, Kymberly. Sure. I... I'm so sorry about your mom."

  "Yeah." She was more nicely dressed than Bethany had seen her in a long time, although the expression on her face was strangely vacant. But then, Bethany reminded herself, she'd just lost her mother.

  The two of them moved away from the other kids over to a corner of the courtyard. After they sat down on one of the benches against the building, neither of them talked immediately. Then finally Bethany said, "Are you okay?"

  "Not really. It's not how I thought it would be. I didn't think it would bother me so much with Mom, you know. I mean ..." Kymberly sighed heavily. "You know."

  Bethany nodded. "I don't want to find out."

  "You're right, you don't." Kymberly turned her head to look at her friend. There was a lot of
unmistakable anger in her face now. "And now my dad's in trouble, mostly because of you."

  "Me? What about me?"

  "You telling the police you saw him show up at the house."

  "Yeah, but I did."

  "Okay, but he says he didn't do that." She stared long and hard into her friend's face. "Don't you get it, Bethany? If he did, that makes him look like he killed Mom."

  "The cop I talked to said they didn't have any suspects yet."

  "Yeah, well they got one now."

  Bethany sat still for a long moment. "I didn't mean that. I mean, for that to happen."

  "Well, what did you think was going to happen?"

  "I don't know. I just answered his questions."

  "Well, you gotta change your answers."

  "How am I going to do that?"

  "Just tell them you made a mistake. You remembered wrong."

  "But I didn't, Kym."

  "You had to, Bethany. It wasn't my dad. If you say it was, they're going to get him. You can't let that happen."

  "But if..."

  Kymberly slapped down hard at her own pants leg. "Listen to me! Forget the 'buts' and the 'ifs.' You've got to change what you told them. That's all there is to it."

  "You mean lie?"

  Kymberly, perhaps frustrated by her inability to get her message across more clearly, fixed her with another menacing glare. "Look, Bethany, it's pretty simple, okay. Either you lie, or . . ."

  "Or what?"

  "God, do I have to spell it out for you? Or something really bad is going to happen. Okay? Get it?"

  The walk along the Marina from Fort Mason to Crissy Field is perhaps the most scenic stroll in a city justly renowned for its physical beauty. Today, with a cloudless, nearly purple sky above, the vista showed itself at its best.

  Stuart and Gina were in shirtsleeves, hands in pockets, keeping up a pace. Before long they'd reached the deep green sycamore and pine hillsides of the Presidio. The pink-domed Palace of Fine Arts presided over the rooftops of the Marina District. To Gina's right, a forest of sailboat masts swayed gently at their berths, while beyond them the shimmering blue bay nurtured the rest of the fleet, a riot of billowing, multicolored sails cutting in and out of one another, flirting often dangerously with the huge transport and/or cruise ships that churned through the channel beneath the impossibly close rusty red cables and steel of the Golden Gate Bridge. In spite of all the full sails out on the water, here on shore only a breath of a breeze blew over them.

  The Michael Douglas trivia had not by a long shot dissipated all of the friction between attorney and client from their morning session at Gina's office. Tension had thrummed between the two of them during Juhle's interrogation itself as Gina continually stepped in, answering—or more precisely, advising Stuart not to answer— many of the questions for which Juhle had already gotten answers the day before. Had Stuart loved his wife? Or hated her? Precisely when had she told him she'd wanted a divorce? What had been those exact circumstances? What time had he come home? Left Echo Lake? How much did he stand to inherit? And so on.

  Neither Juhle nor Stuart had appreciated her efforts. It hadn't helped that the only time Gina had thought it appropriate to cooperate fully with Juhle—when he'd wanted to take a saliva swab for DNA—Stuart had strongly objected. In the end, Gina had prevailed. A DNA sample was something that the police could get by search warrant in any event. There was nothing to be gained by refusing to provide one now. Nevertheless, something about it had galled Stuart immensely, and his reaction had brought to a boil again the simmering anger that Gina had been fighting to suppress all morning. If he was innocent as he said, why would he possibly object?

  Finally, after Juhle had gone, they'd had the money discussion. Sixty-five thousand down, cashier's check or money order, in her office as soon as possible, but no later than the end of the week. Gina wasn't working for free, and this was going to be taking all of her time if it went to a murder charge. Stuart could of course feel free to find other counsel but, she cautioned him, "Like everything else, you tend to get what you pay for."

  Now, to the casual eye, they might have been a long-married couple power-walking for their exercise, making sure they got their hours in, talking of mundane things—the house, the grandkids. But a closer look would reveal a deeper intensity. Stuart had been telling Gina about his daughter—the good and the rather more considerable bad of her.

  "Well, which is it, if you had to choose one?" Gina asked. "Wonderful or difficult?"

  "That's the thing. She's both. The wonderful part would be her mother's incredible brains and drive and even a goodly portion of the Dryden natural beauty. When she chooses to, she can be very, very pretty, but . . . that leads us to the difficult part. In fact, everything leads to the difficult part." He walked on. "I don't know how to say this without it sounding pretty bad, but she's just never really been easy in any way. We called her the Original High Maintenance Kid. And that's when we were feeling good about her."

  "Okay."

  "Well, not really okay. You don't even want to hear about her eating habits, which ranged over the years from gorging herself early on to some pretty intense bulimia over the last couple of years. And let's not talk about mastering all the rudiments of hygiene—hair, fingernails, everything else. You know what she was wearing when she got in yesterday? Salvation Army camo."

  "That's the style, Stuart."

  "All right, but why does she wear that baggy shit when she could be ... attractive? I just don't get it."

  "Maybe she doesn't want to be attractive. Maybe the attention threatens her. I've got a friend who's the same way. She puts on a dress or wears a tank top and guys driving by crash their cars into things. I've seen it happen. She hates it. I don't think that's so abnormal."

  "No, we haven't gotten to the abnormal stuff yet."

  "Which is what?"

  "The true mental stuff, which is really what nearly broke up Caryn and me a long time ago." Stuart gave Gina the extended version— how during Kym's adolescence, she'd tried their collective patiences with every kind of acting out in the book, until finally Caryn had decided that she suffered from "classic" Attention Deficit Disorder and should be on a regular, heavy regimen of Ritalin. "Problem was," he continued, "that I don't really believe in a lot of the versions of ADD that Caryn's high-end medical crowd tends to embrace."

  "Embrace as what?"

  "A one-size-fits-all explanation for high energy and disruptive behavior in young people. I thought that if my daughter needed attention so badly, maybe it was because she wasn't getting enough from her parents, myself included. So I started to take her places with me, the wilderness, the woods, the usual." He shrugged. "For a while, it seemed to help. And at least I wasn't drugging her."

  "So what happened?"

  "So, in the end, it turned out that, as usual, Caryn was more right than I was." Now he came to a full stop and looked Gina in the face. "The truth is we found out that Kym's bipolar, which used to be called manic-depressive. She does need to be on a regular dose of lithium, or she doesn't function right in the real world. And unfortunately, the classic situation, which she fits, is she forgets or refuses to take her pills. When she's on them, she's okay but everything in life is kind of low-key and boring, and she hates that. She wants the high of being manic. So she stops the pills and crashes and burns. You know that time . . ." But suddenly he stopped, looked out over Gina's head to the cloudless sky. "No," he said all but to himself. "Never mind."

  But Gina put a hand on his arm. "Never mind what? What time?"

  Stuart sighed and pointed to a bench next to the walkway. "You want to sit a minute?" And he told her what had really happened when the neighbors had called the police five years before, when "plates had gotten thrown."

  Pulling a trick out of his writer's bag, Stuart had purposely used the passive voice when he'd told Gina about this before. The plates had gotten thrown all right, he said, and Caryn had gotten cut, but he hadn't thrown them—
Kymberly had.

  And Stuart and Caryn at least agreed that they weren't going to let their daughter be charged in the attack. Her life was going to be difficult enough—even if she got everything together and religiously took her medication—without the added burden of a criminal record. She'd gone off her pills again last summer, and this had precipitated the many huge and highly vocal fights between Kym and both of her parents.

  The screaming between male and female voices that the neighbors had heard? It had been Kym and Stuart, daughter and father; not Caryn and Stuart, husband and wife. And when the police had come, he and Caryn had put on the act together, going along as though it had been them fighting—again, to protect their daughter.

  He was sitting on the bench, canted forward, staring out into nothing in front of him. A couple of seagulls had landed in the grass across the path and were raucously fighting over a french fry. Gina cleared her throat. "You could tell this to Juhle, you know. He doesn't think you're a wife-beater, a lot of this goes away."

  But Stuart shook his head. "It'd get out. Kym's got enough to deal with."

  "It might not get out. Juhle can keep a secret."

  "I don't know. I just don't know. Anything." He let out a lungful of air. "You want to be moving again?"

  After they'd covered some ground, Stuart continued. "There's just so much guilt about every part of this. I mean, the truth is that Kym's problems—Kym herself, even—got so she poisoned everything with Caryn and me. Caryn went into her world of position and money and I just withdrew so I didn't have to confront it the whole time. When I was around, I'd try to be a good husband and father, I suppose, but I knew that I couldn't do anything to help my daughter, or to make things better with Caryn. It was just what it was. And I was too weak or, I don't know, too . . . too goddamn impotent to do anything."

  "You thought it was your fault."

  "It was my fault. I'm the one who originally wanted a kid so bad. If it had been up to Caryn, it never would have happened, and everything would have been better."

  "Maybe not better, Stuart. Maybe just different."