The Disappearance

by J. F. Freedman

  “She just came to us with this,” he tells Judge Ewing and Luke. Luke has left Allison back in the courtroom—he doesn’t want the man to stink up the small chambers, and he wants to put some space, if only for a few minutes, between them. To make sure that he doesn’t lean over and try to strangle the sonofabitch to death with his bare hands. “Two days ago.”

  “This is outrageous,” Luke fumes. “There is no excuse in the world why I didn’t have this.”

  Ewing nods. “Why have you withheld this?” he asks the former maid sternly.

  Her head is down. She doesn’t respond.

  “She didn’t withhold it deliberately, Your Honor, and neither did we.” Logan’s got the goods and he’s protecting her. “We didn’t know.” He looks down at the woman. “No one had asked her if she had seen anything like that, and she was too scared to come forward.”

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Luke says in disgust. “Judge, he can’t do that.”

  Again, Ewing denies him. “Witnesses come forward at the last minute,” he tells Luke. “It happens. It happened when you were the district attorney, if I may refresh your memory. You interviewed her months ago, didn’t you? Why didn’t you think to ask her if she had seen anything that night? If you had, Luke, we wouldn’t be here now.”

  “So what do I do now?” Luke asks plaintively.

  “Defend your client,” the judge tells him. “As you have been doing, all along.”

  “Mrs. Gonzalez.”

  She’s on the stand again. Luke, now ready to start his cross, has just had a harrowing, acrimonious half hour with Joe Allison, his client.

  “Tell me you didn’t do it,” he said. “Tell me that wasn’t you she saw. Please don’t tell me that was really you there, that night. Don’t tell me that, please.”

  Allison couldn’t lie anymore. “I was there that night,” he admitted, as Luke paced the small room, his gut exploding. “And it was me who took her out of the room.” He looked at Luke, shaking his head. “I should’ve told you. But if I had, you’d be off the case. So I shut up.” As forcefully as he did on the first day they met, he adds, “But I did not kill her.”

  I had dropped Nicole off, gone home, done some reading, gone to bed. Dead to the world, the telephone rang. Grabbing it, groggy, falling over myself, sprawled out on the bed. “Hello?” I said. A croak, like a bronchitic frog. Clearing my voice, “Hello,” again.

  “Joe.” It was a soft voice, a whisper.

  “Emma?” I knew the voice, knew it well.

  “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you!’ She sounded whiny, as was often the case, but with a fear-edge I hadn’t heard before. She was always so tough and in control, amazingly so, especially for someone her age.

  “I’ve called you, too. We keep missing each other. Where are you?”

  “At home. In my room. I need to see you.”

  I was half asleep and I didn’t like the sound of this, she had never called me late like this before, usually Nicole was staying with me and I didn’t want other women or, in Emma’s case, girls, calling me here, Nicole would get suspicious in a heartbeat.

  “Is your girlfriend there?”

  I should have lied. If I had said yes, all this would be so different. I wasn’t awake enough yet to figure that out, to lie, which she would have expected, not the lying but that Nicole was there, in my bed next to me, either asleep, or awake listening, wanting to know who in the world calls at two-thirty in the morning.

  “No,” I answered honestly. “I’m alone.”

  “I need to see you.”

  I was up now, sitting on the edge of the bed, drinking from the glass of water I kept on the night stand next to the bed, my mouth was dry from sleeping open-mouthed and from the wine earlier. “All right. Meet me at … Starbucks, over by Von’s. I’ll meet you there tomorrow morning. Around ten.” I wanted to sleep in. “Can you get someone to drop you off without making a big deal out of it?”

  “Now. I need to see you now. Right now.”

  “Right now?” I looked at my alarm clock. A quarter to three, almost? No, how could I?

  “Go back to sleep, Emma. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “Now, Joe. Right away.”

  I think I said, “Is something wrong?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you.” Still whispering, as if afraid someone might be listening in.

  She instructed me to come around to the back of the house, to the back doors to her bedroom. She would leave the doors unlocked, the alarm off. But I had to come now, as soon as possible.

  So I did. Who knew what she’d do if I didn’t? I threw on a pair of jeans, T-shirt, windbreaker, baseball hat pulled down low over my eyes. I didn’t think anyone would see me, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  I parked at the edge of the property, where my car couldn’t be spotted by the local security people, in case they were cruising in the neighborhood, entered the gate at the side, and went around to the back. I knew her door. I had been in and out of it before.

  I turned the knob. It was unlocked, like she’d said it would be. I pushed the door open, and entered Emma’s bedroom.

  She was awake. She was sitting on her bed, Indian-style, with a blanket from her bed wrapped around her thin shoulders. It was dark out, but I could see her in the moonlight, sitting there in her nightgown under the blanket, looking up at me.

  Then I froze. There were other girls in the room! Two other girls, one in the spare bed, the other on the floor. Both asleep, but what did they know? Had they been awake when she had called me? Was this some kind of perverted teenage-girl game?

  She beckoned me to her with a crooked finger. When I was right upon her, close enough to reach out and touch her, she raised her mouth to my ear and said, “They’ve been asleep the whole time.” Then she lifted her arms to me, wanting me to pick her up, carry her out of there.

  I did. I carried her away, closing the door behind us.

  I carried her across the lawn, all the way down to the gazebo. We had rendezvoused there before. It was a good place to go and not be seen. The grass was wet, I slipped carrying her.

  “I’m pregnant.” We were sitting on the floor, on her blanket. She had a stub of cigarette in her hand she had scrounged from somewhere in the debris on the floor, and was taking a couple of hits off it.

  I rocked back on my heels. Oh, Jesus. This can’t be.

  “I found out today. Three months, almost.”

  “Emma …” I didn’t know what to say. I was scared out of my mind.

  “Remember when I told you that I’d missed my period? But that I wasn’t worried, because I had missed other ones, lots of girls do for the first couple of years?”

  “Emma …” I was starting to sound like a broken record.

  “Well,” she said, “I was wrong.” She laughed, a high, breathy laugh. “Was I ever wrong.”

  “Are you—?” I was going to say “sure,” but I knew that was the wrong thing, the worst thing I could say.

  “I’m going to have an abortion.”

  “Emma, wait—”

  “I have to do it now. I can’t wait. If I wait, the clinic won’t do it, it’ll be too late, then I’d have to go to a private doctor.” She squinted at me through the haze of the smoke from her butt. “If I don’t do it right away, my mother could find out. Or my dad.” She shook her head. “They’d kill me.” Then she stared at me, stared right through me. “And they’d kill you. My father, for sure.”

  I knew that was true. “Emma,” I said, “are you …?” I didn’t know where to begin. What should I say? What should I do?

  “You’re the father,” she told me. In case I tried to weasel out of acknowledging that. “I’m not fucking anyone else.”

  I stood over her. Wanting to jump off the edge, fifteen feet to the ground. Hide. Vanish into the earth, forever. “When are you going to … have it done?”

  “Next Friday. That’ll give me the weekend to recuperate. The doctor sa
id I should be okay to go to school on Monday.”

  “Do you want me to come with you? Bring you home?” I didn’t want to, of course, but I had to offer.

  “Fuck, no! Like, why not just tell them you’re the daddy?” She shook her head. “I can do this. They’ll help me.” Then she looked up at me. “No one’s ever going to know. That I was pregnant, or that you were the father. Or that we had ever done it at all.”

  I squatted down next to her. She was pregnant. I was the father. We had always used condoms, except the very first time, when she took me by surprise. Three months ago. One mistake, and you pay for the rest of your lives.

  That had been the problem. I couldn’t say no. She had seduced me, believe it, as cleverly as any woman of any age.

  Which is what she did now. “I’m going to have an abortion, we might as well.”

  Off came her nightgown and there she was, naked, and I couldn’t help myself, it had already been done, anything that could be, and I knew it would be the last time, and we made love in the gazebo, at the back of her parents’ property.

  “You’d better be getting back,” I said, after I put my clothes back on, and she had pulled her nightgown back over herself. “In case …”

  “Screw them,” she said. She meant her friends. “They won’t wake up, and so what if they do?” She was fishing around the floor under the soda bottles and beer cans and candy wrappers, coming up with another half-smoked Marlboro. “You leave,” she said. “I want to stay out here by myself for a little while.”

  I was hesitant to leave her, but she shooed me away. “I needed to tell you right away. Now that I have, I’m okay. Go ahead. Go home.”

  I didn’t need further convincing. I went down the steps and across the lawn, my head held low, looking back at the gazebo one last time as I left the property.

  Luke leans against the wall of the cubicle, listening in enraged disbelief. He was there, he allowed her to seduce him right after she told him he’s the father of her baby, but he didn’t kill her? Nobody in the world would believe that.

  “Don’t you think that having sex with her that night was kind of stupid, under the circumstances?” he asks, for lack of something more intelligent to say.

  Allison shuts his eyes. “Of course it was stupid, it was insane. But I did it.” He’s slumped over. “I deserve to be punished, I admit that. But not for killing her, because I didn’t.”

  Where do you go now? “I sure as hell won’t be putting you on the stand. That’s one problem you’ve solved for me.” He thinks for a moment. There is one detail in the maid’s story that doesn’t fit. He’ll attack that, maybe drive a small wedge into this monolith. Even so, Allison was there. He took her out of the room, exactly like Lisa Jaffe had described it. The jury isn’t going to hear anything else.

  “One question.”

  Allison looks up. “What?” he asks dully. His voice, his ticket to ride, is gone, a tremulous, congealed porridge. An old man’s voice. The voice he’ll have for the rest of his life, which won’t be a problem, he won’t have any need for a good voice.

  “What kind of shoes were you wearing? Were you wearing the running shoes? And don’t lie to me,” Luke says, “you’ve blown it completely now, so tell me the truth, one time. I deserve that at least.”

  Allison shakes his head. “I told you, I’d lost them. I was wearing deck shoes, Timberlands. That’s why I was sliding around when I was carrying her out there, the shoes I was wearing had no traction.”

  “You lost them, but then they were found in your closet, a year later.” He puts up a hand as Allison starts to protest. “I know, I know. They were planted. You don’t have to sing that song again. I know it by heart.”

  “They were,” his client says doggedly. “Whether you believe me or not.”

  “That doesn’t matter anymore,” Luke says. “It’s the rest of the world that has to believe you.” He looks up as the deputy monitoring them sticks an inquisitive head in the door. “Or not.”

  “Mrs. Gonzalez.” He stands at the lectern, feeling like a fool, like the man who has no clothes on and has been found out. “You saw Mr. Allison, the accused, walking across the lawn that night. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re positive it was him.”

  “Yes.” There is no equivocation in her voice. “I’m positive.”

  “He was by himself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Emma Lancaster was not with him? Walking with him, or being carried by him?”

  She nods. “He was by himself.”

  “Walking away from the house. You saw him leave the property, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  A small wedge. The only one he has. He reinforces it one more time. “He was alone when he left the property. You could clearly see he wasn’t carrying anything.”

  “Yes. He was alone.”

  “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  Ray Logan rises. “May it please the court, Your Honor.”

  Ewing nods.

  “The prosecution rests.”

  The press corps, lying in wait on the courthouse steps, is bloodthirsty. They’re all pushing and jostling against each other, microphones on long extended booms thrust in the air like tribal lances, on-air reporters elbowing and kneeing their way towards their preferred spots.

  Ray Logan stands in front of a battery of microphones. He looks confident. He isn’t gloating, the case isn’t over yet, but the housekeeper’s shattering testimony has allowed him, for the first time in months, to relax.

  After the platitudinous questions—“How do you feel about your case,” et cetera—he fields the one he knew was coming. “How do you reconcile the maid’s saying she saw Allison leaving alone with your contention that he kidnapped and killed her?”

  “I’m glad you asked that.” If the question hadn’t been asked, he would have introduced it himself, to clear the air of any lingering doubts. “My theory is that he didn’t want to carry her across the lawn to his car without having something to wrap her in, something more substantial than the thin blanket he took from her bed. He didn’t want to be seen carrying her body, not that he expected to be seen at that time of the night. Or maybe he was queasy about her dead body touching his, and wanted to cover it in something, a tarp or something he had in his car. It doesn’t matter. The fact is, he did carry her away. And we know that because we found his shoe print where he hid her body. The identical shoe print we found at the Lancaster house. The same shoe print that we found on the shoe that was at his house, which was his shoe,” he says emphatically. “A clearer trail of evidence than that, I’ve never seen.”

  He fields a few more questions, then he bails out. A maxim to follow—get out while the getting is good. And the getting today, for the prosecution, was very good.

  Doug and Glenna Lancaster, exiting separately, are both swarmed upon by the media mob. They both decline comment, their lawyers and others shielding them from the rapacious horde. They duck into their chauffeur-driven cars and are whisked away.

  Luke doesn’t duck the press. He wants to, but he won’t. That’s admitting defeat, which he will not do in public. He’s as courteous and cooperative as he can be, under the circumstances. Don’t let them think you’re flustered or feel defeated. Make as if you have a solid case of your own, and that when you present it, the field will tilt back the other way.

  He looks out towards the television cameras. “I know what you’re going to ask. Mrs. Gonzalez said she saw Joe Allison at the house that night. But did she, really? It was night, it was dark, she was distracted over her child’s illness. And she’s had eighteen months to think about it, and be bombarded by news accounts of Joe Allison, whose face has been plastered all over the newspapers and on the tube. So finally, his face fits the man she saw that night.” He shakes his head. “Doesn’t this sound really fishy to you?” He pauses, then goes on. “Don’t rush to judgment. I’m saying this to you, the press, and to the publi
c out there. Wait until I’ve put on my case—then we’ll see who’s more convincing. And whether the prosecution has established Joe Allison’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He pauses, dramatically—this is, after all, a performance. “Or even at all.”

  His two-step shuffle for public consumption will buy him a very brief amount of time to stave off the execution. Privately, in the comfort of the rental cottage, he’s consumed with despair, feeling boxed in on all sides.

  “I was right after all,” Riva says, commiserating. “And I didn’t want to be.”

  Luke grimaces. “You were, and I was wrong.”

  All Luke can think about is that he came back for this—to be taken in completely. He had gone in thinking Joe Allison was guilty, then gradually, bit by bit, he ferreted out enough of what he thought was real stuff to create reasonable doubt in his own mind; on top of which, he’d been shot at himself. More than enough incidence and evidence to have brought him around to believing Allison.

  Judge De La Guerra has come over to their house to have dinner with them. “Do you want some advice?” De La Guerra asks. He feels responsible: he put this into motion.

  “From the man who tracked me down and guilt-tripped me into taking this corpse of a case?” Luke asks in self-disgust. “Sure, why not?”

  “Put your case on as if Allison is telling the truth.”

  “I second that,” Riva weighs in.

  Luke moans. “Thank you for your brilliant insight and support.”

  “Why not?” Riva demands, planting herself in front of him, getting in his face. “I told you I thought he had slept with her, but not killed her. Why couldn’t that be true? What about Doug Lancaster, Luke? We still don’t know where Doug Lancaster was that night, and the fact that he’s still not telling points in his direction. What if he found out she was pregnant and that Joe was the father? He discovers it that day and he can’t wait one day more, he has to come home and confront Joe, right now, in the middle of the night. And he sees Joe with Emma, he was following him or whatever—”