Conclusive Evidence

by Al Macy

  Our conversation was totally silent. “I am not the best lawyer for this case. I’ve been out of the criminal defense business for a while. Jen is smarter than I am, and there are probably some hotshot attorneys from San Francisco who could do an even better job.” Jen was the Shek in Goodlove and Shek.

  Carly looked like an angry pit bull. “No. You.”

  I turned to my daughter. “Nicole, you observe only, okay?”

  “Should we bring Jen in?” she said.

  Jen had the rare combination of a heavy-duty intellect and a work ethic that put the stereotypical Asian overachiever to shame. If this turned out to be a murder defense, her knowledge of case law would be invaluable.

  After thinking about it, I made the sign for “no.” “Let’s wait on that. I don’t want to have to translate everything we say.” Turning back to my sister, I started again. “Finally, Carly, let me describe a hypothetical situation. A client comes in and tells me that he … shot his neighbor—”

  “I didn’t kill Angelo.” Carly was breathing hard.

  “Let me finish! If a client admits to a crime, there are certain things I can’t do. I can’t put him on the stand and have him lie, for example. That would be what’s called subornation of perjury.” I fingerspelled the final phrase.

  “Don’t lecture me,” Carly said.

  “This is what I tell all of my clients, okay? Not just you. Now tell me what happened.”

  She started her story. “Detective Crawford and some other cop showed up at my door an hour ago.”

  “The Detective Crawford?”

  “Of course! How many are there?” Carly’s lack of tolerance for fools extended to her twin brother.

  Damon Crawford interpreted the phrase “protect and serve” as “convict and screw over.” He had an us-versus-them attitude when it came to the public—the police versus civilians. I doubted he was assigned this case by luck. He probably weaseled his way into it as soon as he heard that Carly was involved. Their paths had crossed before, to his detriment. This was his chance for revenge.

  Carly tapped me on the shoulder, bringing me back to the present.

  She said, “Some surfers saw Angelo fall from Tepona Point into the ocean.”

  “Tepona Point? Remind me.”

  “You know. Just north of Camel Rock.”

  Got it. It was a ridge that jutted out into the Pacific. A short trail along a knife-edge takes you to an ancient split rail fence that keeps the tourists from danger. Climb over that and you can get a selfie on the cliff edge cantilevered over the ocean. Depending on the tide, a fall would either put you into the sea or into the morgue.

  “I’m sorry, Carly.” I leaned forward and took her hand. She and Angelo were separated, with little chance of reconciliation—well, none now—but I was sure it was a blow for her to learn of his violent death.

  “Wait,” she said. “They didn’t find his body.”

  “Then how did they know he was the man who fell off the cliff? The surfers were far away. I’m surprised someone even noticed, actually.”

  “His car was in the parking lot.”

  I put it together in my head. “So, a surfer paddles in, calls the police, says he saw someone fall off the cliff. They go to Tepona Point, see his car, and assume—what?—that you pushed him off? How did they come to that conclusion?”

  “I’m a person of interest.”

  I let out a breath, relaxing for the first time since Carly came charging into the office. “Of course you’re a person of interest. You’re his wife. That doesn’t mean they think you murdered anyone. You’re jumping to conclusions.”

  “I’m not. I can tell. Crawford has already decided that I killed Angelo.” Carly was an amazing judge of body language. Perhaps many deaf people are. But she was taking her hunch too far.

  “But you said they haven’t even recovered the body.”

  “The swells are running eighteen feet. I saw the Coast Guard helicopter hovering out there. No body yet.”

  “Okay. So we don’t even know for sure that Angelo is dead. Maybe he just went for a walk. Someone or something else fell off the cliff.” I didn’t believe that, but saying it might let Carly relax a bit.

  Or not.

  “What?” she said. “He parked at Tepona Point then went for a walk along the road? You can’t get to the beach easily from there. Give me a break, bro. I hope you’re just saying that. I don’t think you’re that stupid.”

  I glanced at Nicole. She was taking it all in and doing a good job of keeping her hands in her lap.

  I looked back to Carly. “What did you say to the police?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Good. Keep it that way. How did you communicate?”

  “The usual way. I had him speak into my tablet, and I typed in my answers. The tablet converts my typing into speech. You’ve seen that, right?”

  I hadn’t. Carly could speak pretty well. Easily well enough to be understood. But she didn’t. She knew from the reactions she got that it sounded funny, as if she were retarded or something. That was unacceptable to her. Also, she told me that once she spoke, people somehow jumped to the conclusion that she could hear fine. They would stop looking at her when they talked to her, for example.

  “Does the app you use keep a record of the conversations?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me,” I said.

  She bristled, probably because she valued her privacy, then pulled out her tablet and put it on her lap.

  “They came to the door and asked to come in. I said no. They said they were very sorry, blah, blah, then something like, ‘We have reason to believe your husband, Angelo, may be dead.’”

  Carly is an excellent speech-reader, or lip-reader as hearing people say. However, most hearing people don’t realize that speech-readers can rarely understand more than thirty to fifty percent of what is said. Carly’s on the high end of that, filling in lost details from the context. They would have watched her reaction closely, of course. Carly was a stoic person, and a subdued reaction could be taken the wrong way.

  “How did you react?” I asked.

  Carly mimed a posture of extreme shock, two hands up, fingers splayed, mouth and eyes opened wide.

  “Don’t clown around! Damn it, Carly, this could be serious. From now on, there’ll be no jokes. People can interpret expressions incorrectly.” I glanced at Nicole. If she thought her aunt was funny, she was doing a good job of hiding it. I turned back to Carly. “Tell me how you reacted.”

  “I reacted like someone who was just told that her husband, whom she didn’t live with, was maybe dead.”

  She picked up the tablet, queued up the conversation, and handed it to me.

  Carly: Speak normally, and my tablet will translate your speech into text.

  Other: We understand this is hard for you, but we only have a few questions at this time.

  Carly: I’m not a suspect, am I? Angelo and I are separated.

  Other: You are a person of interest.

  Carly: Why?

  Other: You are Angelo’s wife.

  Carly: We’re separated.

  Other: Can you tell me where you were this morning?

  Carly: You know my brother is an attorney. That sounds like something I shouldn’t answer without him present.

  Other: You aren’t under arrest. We just have some questions.

  Carly: I will not answer any questions without my attorney present. Thank you for contacting me.

  I nodded. “Good. I wish all my clients had as much sense. Where were you this morning?”

  “I went running on Clam Beach, then I walked home.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, right past Tepona Point,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you speak with anyone?”

  She gave me a give-me-a-break look.

  “It could have happened.” Because of Bizet, there’s a sizable deaf population in our area. She could easily have se
en a deaf friend.

  She signed, “No.”

  “Okay. I want you to sit down and reconstruct your day in detail, on paper. Do it here, and leave the paper here. This will probably turn out to be nothing. Angelo will show up, perhaps. Are you doing okay?”

  “Angelo and I were through. We stopped loving each other after … after …” Her shoulders sagged.

  I signed, “Maybe there’s some good that can come from this. I’ve missed you, and I hope we can return to the friendship we used to have.”

  Carly nodded.

  “I’ll have Louella use her contacts in the police department to find out what’s going on.”

  * * *

  The day after Angelo’s disappearance, Louella Davis sat at her dining table having a chocolate-covered donut and some afternoon coffee. She tapped the ashes from her cigarette and picked up the Times Standard. Her eyes wandered across the page and stopped on the headline: “Man Falls from Cliff, Presumed Dead.” When she got to the part that stated Angelo Romero may have been the victim, she stopped chewing. Uh-oh.

  If you lined up a hundred people and asked who looked the least like a private investigator, Louella would win hands down. A black woman of sixty-five years, she looked more like someone’s grandmother than a hard-boiled detective. Occasionally, strangers would do a double take when they saw her on the street. It happened once when she was walking beside a friend.

  “Did you see that?” she asked him.

  “The funny look?”

  “Right. Double take. I get that now and then.”

  The friend laughed. “You know why, right?”

  “You gonna tell me?”

  He said, “You haven’t seen The Matrix?”

  “No, I saw it. About twenty years ago.”

  “You look like a character in that movie. The Oracle.”

  Louella had run her hand through the frizzy hair that fluffed out on both sides of her head. “The older woman? Huh. I don’t really see it, but okay.”

  She had brown eyes and dark freckles across her cheeks. Her reading glasses usually sat low on her nose or hung from a beaded chain around her neck. The grandmotherly facade hid the veteran police detective underneath. She’d spent twenty years in LA’s robbery-homicide division then retired to work in the Redwood Point PD. Her nickname, Badger, followed her from Southern to Northern California. She was relentless at digging for information, and she was a lot tougher than she looked. She’d gone private just before the scandal that resulted from an RPPD officer shooting an unarmed man. Lucky for her.

  The article said that Angelo’s wife, Carly, was a person of interest.

  Louella rinsed her coffee cup, made a few calls, and walked the five blocks to Garrett’s office. She had a combined home and office near Old Town, between Garrett’s office and the courthouse. It was convenient back when Garrett was a criminal defense lawyer and supplied her with most of her work.

  Taking a final drag on her cigarette, she climbed the stairs to his office. The man himself was out, apparently, but Jen was in her office with the door open. The two offices had a dog bone floor layout, with the reception area in between.

  “You work too hard,” Louella said.

  Jen startled and looked up. “Louella!” She waved her in.

  The two women hugged, and Louella dropped into a visitor chair.

  Jen Shek’s mother was Japanese and her father, Chinese. Her delicate features always made Louella picture her as a model or actress, not a small-town lawyer. She’d come to the US as a child and was fluent in English, Japanese, Chinese, and, especially, legalese. In her late twenties—it was hard to tell her age, actually—she had a small mouth, small nose, and intense eyes. Eyes that could drill right through a hostile witness. She’d tucked her shoulder-length hair behind her ears, displaying a pair of jade earrings. Her hair matched the dark brown of her zip-up turtleneck sweater.

  “Still smoking,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Louella waved the air in front of her face. “I’m working on it. Down to a couple a day.”

  “A couple of—”

  “How’s the boss doing?”

  Jen leaned back in her chair. “Better. I’ve been worried, but it will be okay. He’s coming around.”

  “No more criminal defense cases though?”

  “No. I doubt he’ll ever go back—I don’t know what he’ll do with Carly’s case.” She leaned forward, looking toward Garrett’s office even though she knew he was out. “He’s lost his edge—maybe that’s a good thing. For him, not for the firm.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He’s nicer now. When he came back to work, he’d changed. The cutthroat, ruthless, take-no-prisoners attorney we all knew? That guy’s gone. He’s a lot more lovable now, but I don’t think he realizes it. I’m sure being Mr. Nice Guy is better for him, but the edge is missing.”

  “He started introspecting too much. That’s the problem. After Raquel and then Patricia—”

  “What do you mean?” Jen frowned.

  “I have a saying.” Louella took a cigarette from her purse, put it in her mouth, but didn’t light it. “The examined life is not worth living. Plato got it backwards.”

  “It was Socrates.”

  “One of those guys. Anyway, he said the unexamined life is not worth living. But it’s when you start examining your life that you get into trouble. Am I happy? Should I have done this or that? What should I do with my life? Am I a good person? Why did that have to happen?”

  “Someone’s in a philosophical mood today.”

  “Yeah, I’ll have to watch that. You know who got it right?”

  Jen smiled. “Who’s that?”

  “George Carlin. He asked why people read self-help books. ‘Life is not that complicated,’ he said. ‘You get up, you go to work, you have dinner, you take a good crap, and the next day you do it all over again.’”

  Jen laughed. “Louella’s outlook on life.”

  “It’s my guiding principle, to tell you the truth. I’m just saying that maybe that’s what broke Garrett. He was going along fine, living his busy but uncomplicated existence. Then the tragedies hit, and he started examining his life.”

  “I don’t think it was that simple,” Jen said.

  “Maybe not. So, Garrett’s only doing family law now?”

  “It fits his new persona better.”

  “But you’re still criminal.”

  “Someone has to be the prick around here.”

  They both laughed.

  As if on cue, Garrett came through the reception area and into Jen’s office carrying some beers and a bottle opener.

  Chapter Two

  I distributed the beers and sat. “Why are my ears burning?”

  My partner’s office was like mine but with an exposed hardwood floor instead of a Persian rug. My son's nature photos adorned the walls: shots of the redwood forest or waves crashing against our rugged coast’s sea stacks. Her leaded windows weren’t quite as tight as mine, allowing some saltwater tang in along with the shrieks of the seagulls.

  Louella said, “Jen was telling me you’re going soft in your old age.”

  “Nah.” I took a swig of beer. “I just see the world a little differently now. You been out of town, Lou?”

  “Because I didn’t come sooner?”

  “Yeah. You would have heard about Angelo and come right over if you’d been in town.”

  She put a finger on her chin as if thinking hard. “I coulda been sick or something.”

  “Not likely. I’ve never seen you sick.”

  “Donuts and cigarettes. You should try it.”

  “Organic?”

  “That’s the secret.” She pointed at me. “The cigarettes are gluten free, and the donuts are non-GMO.”

  “Any scuttlebutt from your contacts?” Jen asked. Neither Jen nor I needed to say anything about confidentiality. Louella knew she’d be on the case.

  “I just flew in today, as Sherlock here figured out. I read the he
adlines and made a call or two. You know about the eyewitness?”

  “Eyewitness?” Jen and I said together.

  “I’ll take that as a no.” Louella rubbed her shoulder. “I heard they have a witness that puts Carly on the trail out to Tepona Point.”

  I choked on my beer and stood up. “Damn! She told me she was on Clam Beach then walked home.”

  Louella said, “She lives on Scenic, right? Tepona Point is between Clam Beach and her house.”

  Jen motioned me to sit down. “You know how eyewitnesses are, partner. Whoever it is could have seen her on the road, but then, when he read the news, thought he’d seen her on the trail. There are lots of possibilities.”

  I paced. “It’s just like Carly to keep something like that to herself.”

  “Come on, Garrett,” Jen said. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself.”

  I sat back down. “You’re right. It’s too personal for me. Did you hear anything else, Lou?”

  “That’s it. You know it’s Crawford’s case, right?”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  Louella finished her beer. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Try to find Angelo. Pretend that we know he’s alive. Treat it like a missing persons case.”

  “Not likely, given that someone dropped off the cliff and his car was left behind.”

  “Yeah, but you know me.”

  “Thorough to a fault.” Louella made some notes.

  “I’m guessing the Coast Guard is still searching for the body?” I asked.

  Louella looked at her watch. “Yeah. It’s only been twenty-four hours. They would have shut it down overnight then started again at dawn. They use a program called SAROPS to guide the search. It makes predictions based on currents, tides, and so on.”

  “How could the body not be found?” Jen asked.

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “It’s not really that surprising. The swell was over eighteen feet. I’m sure you’ve both seen it when it’s like that. White water all the way to the horizon. And the body would sink, right, Louella?”

  “A live person floats because of the air in the lungs. Blow out all your air, and you sink to the bottom. We had a guy near Malibu who floated in a pool facedown. The air never got a chance to pass out of his lungs, and he stayed floating for days. But in that washing machine under Tepona Point, water would have filled his lungs right away.”