“What does it say about time of death?” I change the subject, point to the coroner’s report on Epperson. Harry, juggling the coffee in one hand, the report in the other, starts to read.
“Sometime after seven. The best they can figure. Based on questioning one of the gardeners. He pulled out about that time and locked up.”
“Did you see a gate?” I ask.
“I talked to one of the cops about that, at the scene. There was a gate down bottom, near the parking lot. But you could come in up above on the service road. There’s a bollard, but anybody could drive around it. Kids did it all the time, according to the cops, when they wanted to park.
“And one other thing,” says Harry. “Whoever killed Epperson smashed all the lights before he climbed up the cross to string him up.”
“There were lights?”
Harry nods. “Big floods pointed up from the ground toward the cross. Cops found broken glass all over the place.”
“Epperson could have done that,” I say.
“It’s possible,” says Harry. “But why bother if you’re gonna hang yourself?”
For this I don’t have an answer. We sit in silence for a few seconds until the phone fills the void, the receptionist out front ringing through.
I answer it, punch the com line. “Who is it?”
“It’s the district attorney’s office. Mr. Tate. His secretary on the line.”
I put my hand over the mouthpiece, look down at line one, which is blinking.
“Something’s up. Tate on the line,” I tell Harry.
“I’ll take it.” I punch the line. “Paul Madriani here.”
“Just a moment for Mr. Tate.” A soft, feline voice on the other end. A little elevator music while she puts me on hold. A few seconds later, the line comes to life.
“Mr. Madriani, Jim Tate here.” Avuncular, confident, man in command. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
I start to confirm this, but he doesn’t care, steps on my response. “I have Evan Tannery here in my office. It’s the Crone thing. I think it would be a good idea if we got together,” he says. “Maybe this afternoon in my office.”
“I’ll have to check, see if I’m free,” I tell him. I know I am, but his attitude is enough to piss me off. I put him on hold and look at Harry.
“It’s Tannery’s boss. He wants to talk.”
“What about?”
“Their teat being in a wringer,” I tell him. “But I doubt that he’s going to admit it over the phone.”
“Could be good news. Could be bad. Maybe they found something on Epperson.”
I consider the possibilities. “We may as well find out.” I punch line one again.
“How about two o’clock?” I tell Tate.
“Can we make it three? I have an earlier engagement.”
“Fine.”
“Just have security call up when you arrive. I’ll have one of my people come down and collect you.” He says it as if Harry and I are lost pieces to a game set.
“Right.”
———
Harry has some papers to file downtown, the lingering gun liability case, manufacturer’s nightmare. So we decide to leave the office, head across the Coronado Bridge and take a late lunch at a little spot, a hole-in-the-wall across from the courthouse and the D.A.’s office, one of Harry’s haunts.
We stew over lunch, Harry taking bets that any suicide finding will not be blessed until the coroner holds an inquest.
“Tate’s gonna be looking for cover,” he says. “There’s too much profile in this thing. If we roll him over in the courtroom, he goes belly-up and Crone goes back to the university, Tate’s not gonna be able to show his face at all those fashionable charity events. You want my guess,” he says, “he’ll angle to get the judge to order a mistrial to buy himself time.”
“On what grounds?”
Harry shrugs. “What if he admits they failed to disclose some evidence? Oversight,” he says. “Oops.”
“That might get him a week’s continuance, to bring us up to speed. But if I know my man on the bench, Coats isn’t going to order a mistrial. Not unless they’re withholding film. Some other perpetrator chopping up Jordan,” I tell him.
“So what do you think?” asks Harry.
“Better possibility, Tate tries to get Tannery to force the judge’s hand on a dismissal on technical grounds, something the voters won’t understand, then blame it on the judge. I’ll bet they’re up there now burning the oil over the transcript trying to find some way to bury this thing, even if they have to take a lump or two in the process. It’s easier than going down on a verdict in a case that’s been in the headlines for six weeks.”
“I’ll take it,” says Harry. “Jeopardy attaches. Our man goes free. The D.A. can say the court did it; fingers pointing all around, and the taxpayers get handed a bill for a trial that never ended. Sounds like justice to me.”
Harry is talking with his mouth full of pastrami on rye, mustard running out of the corner and down his chin. He wipes it with a napkin. His elbows are on the table, the knot on his tie is halfway to his stomach. It is vintage Harry.
“I talked with some of the guys in the courthouse pressroom. Conventional wisdom is Tate’s running for reelection next year. From what I hear, he has nothing else to do. They take his office away, he’s gonna have to hang out at the senior center. Take up cribbage,” says Harry.
“Let’s hope he’s motivated to deal,” I say.
The place is emptying out. I look at my watch. It’s a little after two. Harry and I finish up and play musical receipts with the tab. Harry has to hit the bathroom, so I end up with it. I stand at the register, peel off a twenty to pay the bill. Take a five and put it on the table for a tip.
I look through the front window of the empty diner; there are people passing by on the sidewalk, a bus at the stop takes on its cargo, then blows brown smoke and like a tornado pulls away from the curb.
Suddenly I can see across four lanes of traffic to the courthouse on the other side. I kill time waiting for Harry, gaze at the far corner west of the courthouse. It is the physique that catches the eye. Stopped at the light talking to some guy is Aaron Tash, all six feet four inches and skinny. There’s no missing him, a walking streetlamp, human equivalent of a praying mantis.
I wonder what he is doing downtown. He knows the trial has been dark for days. Even if it weren’t, he wouldn’t be allowed in. He’s on the witness list.
Then it hits me. He’s probably on his way to see Crone. Anger begins to set in, wondering how long this has been going on. I continue to watch them, Tash doing most of the listening. The other guy hands him a piece of paper, something from his pocket. Tash takes it, but doesn’t look at it. Instead he slips it into the briefcase under his arm, the same thin leather case he’s carried to the jail to meet with Crone each time we’ve gone.
Harry comes out of the bathroom, waltzes up behind me.
“You get the bill?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go,” he says.
“Hold on.”
“What are you looking at?”
“Over there, on the corner.”
Harry zones in, picks it up quickly. By now Tash has finished his conversation. He heads up the street in front of the courthouse.
“What’s he doing down here?”
“What I was wondering.” I expect him to keep going past the courthouse steps to the corner and down the street toward the entrance to the jail, but he doesn’t. Instead he turns and climbs the stairs, then disappears into the shadows under the courthouse door.
Harry looks at me, thinking the same thing. Tash is headed to the D.A.’s office.
“You think Tate is sweating him?” asks Harry.
“I don’t know.” Suddenly there is the smell of danger in the air.
“You missed the other half,” I tell him.
“What’s that?”
“The guy he was talking to at the corner. Tall, all bul
ked up, a long blond ponytail, his arms all inked up. The last time I saw him was in the bucket talking to Crone down in the dayroom.”
“You sure?”
I nod. It was the felon fodder joshing with Crone that morning, the first time we took Tash to the jail—the blond Viking.
chapter
seventeen
tate’s inner sanctum is a monument to longevity in office. The walls are covered with plaques of platitude: brass tablets and framed scrolls celebrating his high ethics, all presented by groups seeking to curry his favor.
There are framed pictures showing a man who only vaguely resembles Tate, darker hair and more of it, without the jowls that are now his most prominent feature.
Harry and I wander around the room, checking these trophies as Tate finishes a meeting down the hall in the library.
There are photos of the man shaking hands with baseball players, movie stars, other politicians: confirmation of his orbit in the celebtocracy in case he should forget. Some of these shots date him badly, figures in them have held horizontal residence at Forest Lawn for the better part of two decades. Time moving on, catching up.
Harry’s looking over my shoulder with an appraising eye at a shot of Marilyn Monroe showing some thigh, seated on the edge of a desk with Tate’s name placard on it. Tate is seated behind the desk looking very much younger, an eager and rising deputy.
“When he retires, they’re gonna have to take an oral history or lose touch with the ancient world,” says Harry.
“Who says he’s going to retire?”
The clutter of memorabilia is a flea market dream. What purports to be the first Padre baseball thrown out in one of the league play-offs sits on the second-base bag from that same game. A three-hundred-pound block of granite, a tombstone, with the engraving
DEATH PENALTY REPEAL
RIP
stands in a corner of the office, proof of Tate’s credentials in the cop community and the brotherhood of prosecutors. I am told he drapes this with a black lace handkerchief when closeted with deputies deciding whether to seek the death penalty in capital cases, and has scratched notches in the edges of the stone whenever the penalty was exacted in one of their cases. He is no squeamish liberal when it comes to retribution, and plays his politics the same way.
Before I can move to check the edges of the tombstone closer, the door behind me opens.
“Sorry to keep you gentlemen waiting.” Tate sweeps into the office like an autumn wind. Being sucked along in the vacuum of his wake is Tannery.
“Did Charlotte offer you some coffee?”
I wave him off, but he ignores me, plops himself into the chair behind his desk and picks up the receiver on the phone hitting the com line.
“Charlotte, bring in some coffee, will ya? Four cups. You guys want cream and sugar?”
Before we can answer. “Sure, bring it all on a tray. And see if you got some of those little cookies. The ones with the mint.”
He sets the phone on its cradle and he’s back out of his chair before Harry and I can say a word, hanging his coat up on a hanger that dangles from the coat tree in the corner.
“You must be Madriani.” He reaches over on his way back to the desk, shakes my hand in an almost absent fashion as he passes by.
“Harry Hinds, my partner,” I tell him.
He has to backtrack to catch Harry’s hand. “Good to meet you. Have a seat. Sit down.” He directs us to the two client chairs. Tannery pulls up a ladder-back chair from the small conference table across the room and joins us.
“Heard good things about you both,” says Tate. This is very much his meeting, in control.
“Seems we have some mutual friends up in Capital City.” He mentions some names, fixtures in the local bar and on the bench.
“You represented Armando Acosta,” he says.
I nod.
“That was a big case. Got headlines all over. Not every day you get a state court judge charged with murder. Especially,” he says, “where there’s a little nookie involved.” He pulls on his right earlobe, smiles as if perhaps he can entice me to share some confidences from the past. Tate is referring to charges that the judge had been snared in an undercover vice sting by a pretty decoy sent out by the cops to nail him. She was later found dead, and Acosta was charged with her murder.
“Those charges were never proven,” I tell him.
“Of course not,” he says. “You won the case. Judge Acosta is eternally in your debt, from what I understand. Your biggest cheerleader. That was not always the case.”
“I haven’t been able to try a case before him since the trial. Judge Acosta is scrupulous in disqualifying himself in any matter in which I am involved.”
“Funny how that works. Do somebody a favor and it comes back to bite you in the ass.”
“The law is not politics,” I tell him. “That is, if it works right.”
He smiles. “Of course not. Which brings us to the reason for today’s meeting. Some pretty fortuitous events,” he says, “the death of a witness on the eve of testimony. I’ll bet that hasn’t happened in one of your cases before?”
“Not that I can recall,” I tell him.
“Obviously it’s thrown a glitch into the people’s case.”
“We noticed,” says Harry. Harry’s getting tired listening to the bullshit. He wants to cut to the chase. “Why did you call us in here?”
“We still think we have a solid case against your man. Don’t get me wrong,” says Tate.
“Is that why you called? To tell us you have a solid case?” I ask.
He looks at Tannery, smiles. “No. I called you here to discuss a possible resolution. As it stands, your client can’t be sure he’s gonna beat the wrap. Don’t misunderstand; the Epperson thing throws up some dust. It may not be quite as clear as it was before, but there’s still the question of the cable ties in his pocket, the tension tool in his garage, the fact that he and the victim were not on good terms. The medical evidence points to a skilled hand dismembering the body. There’s plenty there for a jury to chew on,” he says.
“And given this . . . mountain that we have to climb, what are you prepared to offer?”
“A solution that provides your client with a more certain result,” he says.
“What? You gonna pump the poison directly into his heart instead of his arm?” says Harry.
“What if the result avoids the death penalty?” says Tate. “Perhaps a life sentence without possibility of parole.”
“Not a chance,” I tell him.
Tate looks over at Tannery once more. The expressions that are exchanged between the two lead me to conclude that this was not Tannery’s idea. He knows he doesn’t have the leverage, but you can’t blame Tate for trying.
“Okay. Second degree,” he says. “We drop all the special circumstances, he gets fifteen to life; with good behavior he could be out in ten. That’s as good as it gets,” he says.
I look at him, say nothing, Mona Lisa smile on me.
“Fine, we’ll sweeten it a little.” Tate doesn’t know when to stop talking. “Your guy pleads out, we agree not to bring any charges regarding the Epperson thing as to him, if he cooperates with us.”
“Cooperate how?” I ask.
“Tells us what happened.”
“No problem. Mr. Epperson committed suicide,” I say.
“And you believe that?” he says.
“The last time I looked, there was nothing in the Evidence Code giving rise to presumptions based on what I believe. But I think if you look at the facts they might bear it out. Do you have evidence that Epperson didn’t commit suicide?”
Tate doesn’t have good lawyer’s eyes; perhaps that is why he left the courtroom and became a politician. His big brown ones say, No.
He swallows, clears his throat, looks over at Tannery. “Evan, maybe you should get involved here.”
Tannery edges over. “It’s a good deal,” he tells me. The devil in front of me, and the devi
l in my ear.
“I’ll take it to my client,” I say.
“Will you recommend it?” says Tannery.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because your case is in a ditch. I’d have to be incompetent to recommend a deal like that.
Tannery looks at me; his eyes get wide.
“All the testimony regarding my client’s alleged motive to kill Kalista Jordan, the supposed racial genetics studies intended to inflame the jury, that’s all out. Everything Tanya Jordan testified to is hearsay without Epperson, so all you have are some nylon cable ties and a tensioning tool found in the defendant’s garage, that and some bad blood between Crone and Jordan. At worst, this can be characterized as a severe case of professional differences. What’s more,” I tell them, “did you know that Epperson asked her to marry him? That she turned him down just a few days before she disappeared?”
I can tell by the look on their faces that this is news.
“Who told you that?”
“You want to find out, we’ll do it in court,” I tell them. “On the other side of the slate, you now have a suicide note and a confession typed on Epperson’s computer admitting that he killed her.”
“Unsigned,” says Tate.
“Did you find anybody else’s fingerprints on Epperson’s computer keyboard?”
Dead silence.
“I didn’t think so. You have the physical evidence at the scene, which is consistent with suicide. You have cable ties and a tensioning tool found at Epperson’s.”
“Very convenient circumstances,” says Tate.
“Convenient or not, the jury is more than likely to find reasonable doubt in those circumstances.”
I wait a beat to see if they want to contradict this. They don’t.
“I will assume silence as assent,” I tell them. “And we have an order by the trial judge compelling you to deliver whatever other evidence is in your possession regarding Epperson’s death to us by tomorrow morning. I’d say we’re in pretty good shape. I think we’ll wait.”
Tate’s eyes get beady, little slits of meanness. “We won’t give up on Epperson’s murder,” he says.
“That’s going to be a problem for you.”
The Jury Page 23
