Guilt

by John Lescroart

  'You don't need to get snippy.'

  'I'm not being snippy. I'm trying to respond in whole sentences to the topic we are trying to discuss. Now. This woman tells you that twenty-some-odd years ago, she went on a date with Mark Dooher and she took him back to her apartment and got him drunk and then he raped her.'

  'And threatened to kill her.'

  'Sure, why not? That, too. And because of that, if it is true…'

  'It is true.'

  'If it is true, I should abandon my life-long best friend, whom you now seem to believe is a murderer. That's where we are?'

  'That's right.'

  'He killed his wife because he allegedly raped this woman?'

  'Wes, don't go all lawyer on me. He didn't allegedly rape this woman. He raped her.'

  'No, wait a minute. She invited him up to her apartment, plied him with drink, started making out with him…'

  'And then told him to stop, that's right. And he didn't.' She was giving him that look – eyes hard and challenging. 'That's rape.'

  'Ex post facto.'

  'What does that mean?'

  'It means now it's considered rape. Then it wasn't considered rape. It's like people who say Lincoln was a racist, when they didn't have the same concept back then. By today's standards, everybody was a racist a hundred years ago. Same with date rape. It's all semantics.'

  'It's not semantics at all. He raped her.'

  'I'm not saying date rape isn't rape. I'm saying thirty years ago, a lot of girls said no and didn't really mean no.'

  'I'm not going to get into how Neanderthal that sounds, Wes, but this particular woman didn't just say no. She tried to fight him off and he told her he'd kill her.'

  'No, he didn't.'

  'What? How can you possibly-?'

  'Because I know Mark Dooher. He's not going to kill somebody in college over a piece of ass. Come on, Sam. You're a rape counsellor, for Christ sake. You know how this goes. She invites him up…'

  'She asked for it, right? Don't give me that one, please.'

  'I don't know if she asked for it. I wasn't there, but it sure wasn't the same thing as lurking in the bushes and assaulting her as she walked by.'

  'Yes, it was, Wes. That's the point.'

  They were still standing where they'd stopped, in the middle of a fogbound street in the gauzy glow of one of Church Street's lights. Wes had his hands in his pockets. He hadn't thought they were going hiking, and in his business suit, he wasn't dressed for the chill.

  He forced himself to slow down, take a breath, not let this escalate. They'd work it out. It was just that right now they were both charging at one another. He thought he'd pull back a little, lower the voltage.

  'Look, Sam. How about we go someplace? Sit down. Maybe have some food. Calm down a little.'

  She crossed her arms. 'I am calm. And I don't need that condescending "Take the little lady someplace she can't make a scene" bullshit either.'

  'I am not doing that. I thought we might be able to have a reasonable adult discussion in a more comfortable environment.'

  'This environment seemed to be comfortable enough until we got on this.'

  'On rape, or what you're calling rape, you mean?'

  'What I'm calling rape! Goddamn it, Wes, I expected a lot more from you.'

  'Well, yelling is a big help.'

  'There!' Now she was yelling. 'Put me down again. Don't discuss the real subject, whatever you do. Jesus Christ!'

  'I'd like to discuss the real subject, Sam, but first I can't get out a whole sentence, and then I'm getting screamed at while I'm freezing my ass off, getting all kinds of motive laid on me for the truly ominous, condescending idea of finding someplace warm to sit down. Give me a break, would you? I didn't rape anybody. I'm not the enemy here.'

  'My enemy's friend is my enemy.'

  He brought a hand up to his forehead. 'That's good. What's that, Kahlil Gibran or the PLO Handbook?'

  'It's common sense is what it is. It's survival.'

  'I didn't think we were in survival mode.'

  'All women live every day in survival mode.'

  'Jeez, that's good, too. What are you doing, writing a book of feminist slogans?'

  'Fuck you.'

  She turned and was walking off.

  He followed after her, his own volume way up. 'You've been working at that center too long, you know that?'

  She whirled on him. 'Yeah, that's right. I've been working, of course that's the problem. Women shouldn't work, should they, Wes? They shouldn't have their own lives.'

  'Sure, that's what I'm saying, Sam. That's what I think. I wonder if you could twist it anymore.'

  'I'm sure I could. I'm a woman, after all, I don't get things right.'

  'I'll tell you something. You didn't get at least this one thing right. My friend Mark Dooher didn't kill his wife and I'd be Goddamned surprised if he raped this lady, either. She saw his name in the paper, she wants her twenty minutes of fame. You ever think of that?'

  'Oh no, Wes, that never crossed my mind. You asshole.' She started walking away again. Stopped, turned back. 'I heard her. I saw her face. This happened, Goddamn it, whether or not you believe it.'

  'What happened? She maybe said "no" thirty years ago, and just forgot about it until now? I'm sure.'

  Sam said nothing.

  'Did she seek counselling? Did she tell anybody? Did she report it to the police back then? Did she do a fucking thing? No.'

  'It ruined her life. It changed everything in her life.'

  'How sad for her. And now, damn, look at this, what a surprise! Mark Dooher's in the news and it all comes back. And – this is the great part – this means my best friend, who I've known only a hundred times longer than I've known you, this means he killed his wife he loved and raised a family with? Please. I mean it, Sam, you got to get a life here. This is ridiculous.'

  This time, she started walking away and didn't turn back.

  'Hey, Bart. Daddy's home.'

  It was ten o'clock.

  The dog got up, yawned and walked slowly over to where his master stood. Wes petted him distractedly, then schlumped into the kitchen, turning on the light, checking for dog shit. He paid a young woman who ran a small graphics business out of her apartment in the building to take Bart out two or three times a day, but sometimes that wasn't quite enough. Today it had been.

  The refrigerator held a couple of six packs of Rolling Rock, and he took out two bottles and opened them both, drank one half down, pulled out the kitchen chair and sat heavily at the table.

  He felt a hundred years old.

  He ached to simply pick up the phone there on the wall and apologize until dawn. But he didn't move. The phone didn't, either. Eventually, he lifted the bottle of beer again, staring out at the night.

  This was not supposed to happen. Everything had been going better than it ever had in his life, even better – he thought – than it ever had with Lydia when they'd been young and believed they must be in love.

  In the first heady rush of physical pleasure, and then in the next weeks of growing intimacy, he'd put Sam's occasional penchant for volatility out of his mind. That first night, when she'd thrown him out after learning that he was defending Levon Copes – he'd chosen to believe that that had been an aberration born of insecurity and alcohol.

  But evidently it wasn't.

  It was better to find out now rather than later, he supposed, but he wasn't in the mood to put much of an optimistic spin on anything just now.

  He'd wracked his brain all the way home, playing Devil's Advocate with himself, conjuring all the negative images of Mark that he could remember. But there were so few of them and that was the truth.

  Once, in college, when they were engaged, Mark had cheated on Sheila. But he'd been riddled with guilt because of it – told Wes all about it on one of their 'retreats'; wondered if he should call off their impending marriage because he was such a bad person.

  He'd backhanded his son, Mark Jr, acr
oss the face for throwing his bat in a Babe Ruth League game. That, Wes thought, was Mark's worst moment. But at the time Mark had been working eighty hours a week trying single-handedly to save his ailing firm. And he'd tried to turn even that incident, bad as it was, into something positive – treating it as a type of wake-up call. He was working too hard, ignoring what was really important. His family, his spiritual values.

  In some way, these peccadilloes reassured Wes about his friend's character. Mark would be the last to say he was perfect. Of course he had sinned – he was human. He'd done things he was ashamed of. But these were why, to Wes's mind, he was balanced. He wasn't wound so tightly holding in every tiny impulse to evil that he would one day need to explode.

  So he tried to figure out what it was; why the sudden rush from so many quarters to slander and vilify Mark Dooher.

  Jealousy was one thing. Mark was wealthy, powerful, and up until a couple of months ago, lucky. He was exactly the kind of person that lesser people loved to see destroyed.

  Then the Trang business, politically motivated and unfounded as it was, had put a hole in Mark's bubble of invincibility. And Wes knew that an enduring truism of life was that accusations bred more accusations.

  And now – finally – the dominant bull was injured, limping. This was the time to take him down, when it could be done. Everybody was abandoning Mark. People were lining up to take shots at him when he was least able to defend himself.

  Well, Wes wasn't anybody's hero, and he couldn't stop anybody from taking aim and firing, but he could stand in front of his friend and try to defend him until he was strong again.

  Trang's murder. This woman's rape story. The enemies were assembling and he didn't have to think too hard to figure out what was coming next. They were going to charge him with Sheila's murder.

  And Wes knew he would be the last line of defense. And for once – whatever they might dig up and however it spun – he knew it wouldn't be true.

  Wes was going to defend him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  A week later, Paul Thieu got his first real break in the case.

  It was not without some trepidation that he guided his city-issue Plymouth off the freeway at the Menlo Park exit, forty miles down the peninsula south of the city, and negotiated the narrow entrance to the parking lot by the Veterans Administration building. The short drive between the freeway and the VA reminded him of 6th Street between Mission and Bryant in San Francisco, the most dangerous walking blocks on the map.

  Though the climate down here was infinitely more benign, the small town thoroughfare itself was a no man's land of Reagan's enduring legacy, the mentally impaired homeless. The cops called these people 'eight hundreds' and their social workers called them 'fifty-one fifties' after the Welfare & Institutions code sections that defined them, but by any name, they were tragic. Derelicts, drug addicts, bag people.

  Thieu saw them every day in the city, but here within a long spit of Silicon Valley, where the sun always shone and the real estate glittered, he found all this evidence of poverty and despair especially dispiriting.

  He was also keenly aware of his Vietnamese nationality. Men in old Army uniforms – singly or in small groups – loitered here and there on the main street and under the trees that provided the shade for the parking lot. Thieu didn't have to guess which war they were veterans of.

  And time might have passed, he knew, but in the brains of some of these guys, it still might be 1968.

  He opened the car door into what was, by San Francisco standards, blazing heat. It was not yet noon and already in the mid-eighties. Thieu was wearing an ivory linen suit and decided he could leave his raincoat on the passenger seat where he'd thrown it. It was misting heavily in San Francisco, forty miles away. The temperature was in the fifties.

  A couple of guys in old fatigues nudged each other as he passed them on the way to the imposing doors, but he smiled and said hello and was past them and through the doors before they had moved two steps.

  The place had that old institutional-building feel and smell. A wide entryway with linoleum floors made every sound inside echo. To his left, a waist-high counter separated the government workers from the veterans, who were for the most part queued up waiting for their numbers to be called. Across from the counter, a shiny, light-green wall sported wood-framed photographs of all the Presidents since Eisenhower, as well as a decent assortment of Admirals and Generals (including another one of Eisenhower in uniform). At the end of the entryway, a large paned window let in a lot of light.

  Thieu stood a minute, getting his bearings, reading from the Building Directory in its glass bulletin board. Gradually, he became aware that the noise had ceased behind him.

  Deciding to ignore it, he found the room number for his appointment and moved out directly.

  'Hey!'

  Somebody was calling after him, but he came to the big window, hung a left, and took the stairs two at a time.

  They had been lucky, locating Chas Brown here at the south peninsula VA detox. Neither Thieu nor Glitsky had really known where Brown might lead them, but Glitsky was directing this investigation and he'd sent Thieu down to conduct the interview.

  Last Thursday and Friday, he'd run around trying to get a handle on either a Chas Brown or a Michael Lindley, the two other survivors of Mark Dooher's platoon in Vietnam. Their names had been provided, during the Trang investigation, by Dooher himself.

  Now, Glitsky smelled blood. He told Thieu that they simply had to find out everything they could about Dooher, from whatever source. Glitsky was working St Francis Wood, talking to the neighbors, working the pawnshops in the adjoining neighborhoods, still looking against hope for the bayonet, the clothes Dooher was wearing, something.

  And Thieu, with his background, started out to find yet another missing person.

  Chas Brown wasn't a total burn-out case. True, in his faded jeans and flannel shirt, with his long, unwashed graying hair and beard, he didn't look like anyone who worked for a living, blue or white collar. But his eyes were clear, his handshake firm.

  He showed up at his counsellor's office on time, promptly at noon, exhibiting no signs of prejudice toward Thieu. After a couple of minutes, Thieu offered to take him to lunch. There was a terrific pizza place not far away named Frankie, Johnny & Luigi Too.

  Brown looked like he wouldn't turn food down – he weighed about a hundred fifty pounds. He was nearly six feet tall.

  Thieu also thought he'd get franker answers if he was away from his counsellor.

  So now they were sitting at a table outside under the green and white umbrellas, sharing a large pizza, of which Thieu wouldn't be able to eat more than one enormous piece. Fully loaded with pepperoni, sausage, olives, mushrooms, peppers, double cheese and anchovies, one slice weighed in at nearly a pound.

  Judging from how he started it, Thieu guessed Chas would finish the entire large pitcher of Budweiser he'd ordered. He was already on his third glass. Thieu was having iced tea.

  The two men weren't yet friends, but the beer wasn't exactly making Chas taciturn. The pocket tape recorder was rolling and they'd already covered Thieu's background, verifying that he was too young to have fought in Vietnam. His father hadn't been in uniform, either, though he'd been anti-Communist all the way. A capitalist in the silk trade in Saigon, the elder Mr Thieu had to leave when the city was abandoned by the U.S. So Thieu and Chas were on the same side.

  'That's when my name changed.' Brown had a lot of nervous energy. Tics and scratches, eyes moving all the time. But he was talking clearly, if a little rushed. Maybe the beer would eventually mellow him out. 'Before I got in country I was Charles, Charlie Brown. When I was a kid, I would have done anything not to be named Charlie Brown, so of course it stuck like glue. Then I get to Nam and Dooher says there's no Charlie in his platoon, I'm Chas. So I'm Chas. I thought it was a good omen at the time. I thought Dooher was a good guy. Shows you what I knew.'

  Thieu didn't want to stop him, and rem
ained silent as Brown downed another deep slug of beer, the eyes going blank a moment. Another drink, more emptiness. Blink, the lights went back on, led to the abrupt segue. 'Tried to be my friend, y'know, after.'

  'After what?'

  The eyes came back, then darted away. 'You know.'

  'I don't know.'

  'About the dope, all that. I thought that was what you came down here for.'

  In fact, Thieu's main avenue of inquiry was going to be about the ease of smuggling bayonets and rifles out of the country when your hitch was up. Instead, a bonus, Chas Brown was heading in a different direction.

  'What dope?' Suddenly, Brown's expression closed up. Was Thieu trying to sandbag him in some way? The open camaraderie – the ruse of drinking together, having lunch – faded. The change in Brown was palpable. Suddenly Thieu was the heat and that wouldn't help his investigation, so he moved into damage control mode. 'I'm not interested in dope, Chas. I'm interested in a murder.'

  'Well, yeah.' Meaningless, unforthcoming.

  Thieu pressed it. 'Look, Chas, it's none of my business what drugs you're taking, or took. I want you to understand that. Here,' he pointed at the tape recorder on the table between them, 'I'm saying it on this tape. It's on the record. This has nothing to do with you except insofar as you know something about Mark Dooher. Did he take drugs, was that it?'

  Brown moved out of the blazing sun, into the shadow of the table's umbrella. He wiped his high forehead and took a long pull of beer. 'Everybody took drugs,' he said. 'Everybody.' He scratched at his neck.

  'Dooher bought our drugs. He was the connection.'

  'Mark Dooher was selling marijuana?'

  Brown laughed. 'Marijuana? Look at me, you think I'm strung out on marijuana? You think thirty years down the line, my brain's fried on some doob?' He shook his head, amazed at Thieu's world view. 'We're talking shit here, china white, skag.' Thieu digested this. 'Horse, man. Heroin.'

  'You're saying Mark Dooher sold you heroin?'

  A continual nod. 'That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Not just me. The whole platoon. Got his own stash free and sold to his guys. Did us a favor, lowest price in Nam.'