by Lia Matera
I needed a place to hide. I needed to find a hollow tree or a thick bush—anything to cloak me out here, spare me the need to crash on, making tip-off noises along the way.
But my luck ran out. I didn’t find a hiding place. I found a sudden ravine. My foot, expecting spongy ground, slid downward, catching on a root. I fell, slithering down a steep decline, smashing against limbs, ripping my clothing and my skin, inhaling rain and mud, turning in a slosh of duff and vegetation and wet, fungal earth. I fell fast and hard. But unfortunately, not far enough.
Within seconds of coming to a stop, I saw the dark shape standing over me. I’d forged an audible path down the hill. One that was easily and quickly followed.
It was no use. I hadn’t managed to escape or to hide. I was on the ground with a drop-off in front of me and my worst enemy blocking my way back.
I lay twisted in mud and roots and fallen branches, the rain battering me to my frozen bones. Running and hiding had vanished as options. There was certainly no weapon at hand to match a gun. I had only one option besides immediate capitulation.
I seized it: I screamed, long and loud, screamed and screamed, thinking this instant was my last.
The wind carried my cries down the ravine, where they echoed almost louder than the storm. Almost louder, but not quite. I screamed again, opening my lungs, making myself roar against the tempest. Nothing less would make a difference.
37
I heard gunshots. Strangely enough, two of them, one behind me and to my left, the other off to my right someplace. Neither was close enough to have come from Connie Gold.
“They heard me scream,” I panted.
She stood just uphill from me, a dark shape recognizable in its narrowness, in the cut of its suit, the length of its blowing hair. Her arm was outstretched, aiming a gun at me.
“They heard me. They’ll be here fast. They’ll catch you.” I assumed one of the blasts came from Sandy’s .38. I prayed the other hadn’t come from Gold’s accomplice, from the masked man who’d tried to shoot me twice already. “Sandy,” I screamed. “Sandy, over here.”
I watched Gold lower the gun arm, look over her shoulder.
Then she turned away, just plain turned away. Turned and left.
God damn. Was she going to try to walk away from this? Deny she’d shot at me?
“Sandy,” I shouted again. “Get her. It’s Gold!” I struggled out of the mud and brambles. I clawed my way up the incline until I was back on level ground.
I had to catch up with her. Had to grab her. The Sheriff would never accept my identification if I let Gold slip away. He’d scoff: It was dark out here. I’d only seen a silhouette, a shape. I had an ax to grind—Gold had had me arrested. No one would believe me.
And though Deputy DA Leiden would confirm (I assumed) that Gold had phoned to tell her Rommel had escaped, phoned to ask her to contact me, Gold would claim she’d been disoriented after her hospitalization. Or perhaps she’d claim Leiden had misunderstood. Or something.
Because of course Brad Rommel hadn’t escaped from jail. How could he leave a locked cell? Why would he be left unguarded? It didn’t make sense, it wasn’t possible. And yet I’d believed it.
I’d taken the bait. I’d driven to Rommel’s cabin to reign in police I expected to find here. I’d done what any criminal lawyer would do. I’d done what Connie Gold expected.
If I’d arrived alone, I’d have been found dead. Leiden would confirm I’d come based on her false information. Gold would either deny being the source or apologize for having misled Leiden in her wounded haze. Both DAs would issue statements stressing their determination to capture and convict whomever had followed me here to shoot me.
Gold would get away with it. She’d resisted the temptation to say anything to me. She’d made it impossible for me to offer a positive ID.
She’d mastered the urge to shoot me. With others close by, she’d never have gotten away. If Sandy had found me dead, he’d have searched instantly and exhaustively for my killer. As it was, by the time I panted out my story, Gold would be gone.
I ran back toward Rommel’s cabin, shaking with frustration.
We had to catch her right now, gun still in her hand. If we didn’t, no one would believe us. No one would believe she’d left her bed to lure me out into a rainstorm. No one would believe her hatred was so personal and so strong.
But I knew how I felt about Steve Sayres and his insinuations. Connie Gold must feel that way about me. Insulting articles about her, witnesses suing her, the State Bar investigating—all because of what I’d suggested, what I’d alleged.
I’d brought the cynical, accusatory media machine down on her. I’d undercut her status and her image. I’d left her vulnerable to lawsuits that might bankrupt her. I’d done it just to even the playing field.
It chilled me to think of myself as Gold’s Steven Sayres.
No wonder she hated me. She hated me enough to hire someone to shoot me, hire someone to try to run me over. She hated me enough to put a motel phone number in my pocket, probably as soon as she had access to the jacket used to stanch her bleeding. Wounded as she was, she hated me enough to concoct a lie to draw me out into the woods, enough to crawl out of her bed, hide her car in some off-road pocket, and hike up here to shoot me herself.
And worst of all, she’d been smart. She’d put her rage aside and walked away while she could.
How would I ever prove any of this?
Anything I said would be discounted by my public hatred of her. My accusations would be laughed off as mere bitterness.
She’d failed to kill me. She’d had to cope with an innocent woman’s death. She’d been wounded by her own hired gun.
But she hadn’t let it make her foolish. She’d been smart when it mattered most.
I reached the cabin, shouting Sandy’s name, colliding with him in the darkness.
“Jesus!” he panted. “God damn, where did you come from? I expected you to be way the hell— You okay? What happened?”
“Gold. Tried to kill me. It’s Gold. Rommel’s not free—that’s why there’s no sheriff here.” I struggled to catch my breath. “She lied to Leiden. To get me out here and shoot me.”
“Gold?” Even Sandy sounded skeptical. “She’s in the hospital.”
“No. She’s out. She was standing over me ready to shoot me.”
“And then what?”
“She heard the answering shots when I screamed. She took off. Realized she didn’t have a second to waste if she was going to get away.”
“Who fired the other shot?” Sandy grabbed my shoulders as if to keep me upright. “That’s what I followed, the shot, not your scream. Who fired? Do you know?”
“No. No. I think that must be what spooked her. She must have thought she was alone, except for us. She’d seen you. But she didn’t know anyone else was here. Must have panicked her. She just turned around and took off. Just took off. Put her safety above killing me.”
Sandy pulled me close. He didn’t say anything.
That disturbed me. I pushed back out of his arms, though I could barely see him in the pelting rain. “It was Connie Gold, Sandy. I could tell.”
“Positive enough for a police ID?”
“Yes!” I was hot with rage in spite of the weather. “It was Gold, all right.”
But I knew I wouldn’t be believed. It was too dark, too fierce out here. No one could confirm the identification. Gold would claim to have been in bed recuperating. And my dislike for her was notorious.
“Come on.” Sandy began walking me toward his car. “Let’s get back before the battery dies.”
“We’ve got to look for her. No one will believe me if I don’t catch her.”
“She could be anywhere. We’re not going to find her.”
“Then let’s go to where she’s supposed to be. Let’s pro
ve she’s not home.” I couldn’t let her get away with this.
“We’ll hustle down to a phone. Get your uncle to send his cops pals to the hospital, check her bed.”
“To her house. She was probably released before we got the call from Leiden. She must have called Leiden from home with this story about Brad. Hospital wouldn’t be private enough.”
“Let’s hurry, then.” He hustled me along.
But I got the feeling he wanted to get out of the rain. Get dry. Get safe.
I wasn’t sure he believed me about Gold. He knew more than anyone how much I hated her.
38
I was never happier to be dry, warm, at home. My uncle had twice refilled my glass of vodka. Sandy had a fire going.
“Well,” I said, “I never thought I’d be so glad to hear my client was in jail. At least that confirms what I’ve been telling you.”
“And Gold being released from the hospital. Lying to Leiden,” Sandy added. “That’s a match.”
We’d spoken several times with the sheriff. Leiden, we learned, had heard of the “escape” via phone message, supposedly from Gold. But Gold had yet to confirm this. Even if she did, the sheriff seemed willing to dismiss it as the confusion of a wounded woman.
Sheriff Turitte wouldn’t tell us if he’d spoken to Gold. Initially, of course, she hadn’t answered her phone or her door. Whatever the sheriff chose to believe, she hadn’t been there, asleep. She’d been on her way home after trying to shoot me.
But she’d been back for a while now. She’d had time to deny it all, including, perhaps, the message to Leiden.
“I have to make her furious somehow. Out-of-control, out-of-her-head furious. If she doesn’t blow it, completely lose her cool and incriminate herself, no one will believe me.” I’d said the same thing with each previous vodka. Neither Sandy nor my uncle bothered replying.
“Well …” Sandy’s voice was a slow drawl. “Say Gold really can’t handle it that you made her into a public bad guy. Say she did hire someone to take you out. That accounts for Jocelyn Kinsley and maybe the guy in the car and the guy in hall that shot Gold—accidentally when you ducked. What about all this other stuff? The buckets of blood? The mall? The airplane?”
“Meaning, let’s change the subject before I bore you both to death.”
My uncle looked shocked. He slumped in his rocker, much the worse for whiskey. “Somebody trying to kill you is not a boring subject.”
But Sandy smiled. “Yeah, enough about you.”
“Gold put a motel phone number into my pocket. So presumably that’s not the way to find the guy who did the shooting. That means he stayed with someone here in Hillsdale or he lives here, and he took a room when he went to San Francisco.” I wasn’t ready to leave the subject. “I vote for lives here.”
“Would have to be someone Gold trusts beyond anything sensible.” Sandy shook his head. “DA more than anybody would realize how easy it is for a trigger to roll over on whoever hired him.”
“So it’s someone Gold’s very close to, or someone who owes her a hell of a favor.”
Sandy sat up, taking his weight off his spine. “Or someone she could do a hell of a favor for.”
“Oh, no.” I watched him. “No. It couldn’t be.”
“What?” my uncle demanded. “Couldn’t be what?”
Sandy scowled down into his drink. He wasn’t going to say it.
I glanced at my uncle. “Nothing,” I lied. “Just talking.”
I put my glass down. It was a wonder it hadn’t occurred to us before.
39
I sat in the visiting room opposite Brad Rommel. He looked heavy-lidded, shockingly pale given his natural ruddiness. His yellow-blond hair bristled in oily clumps. The gray jail overalls muted his eye color to a sweet powder blue. His hands, palm down on the heavy linoleum table, were chafed and red, fisherman’s hands though he hadn’t fished much lately.
“Did you know I’d been arrested?”
His brows lowered. “What do mean arrested? For what?”
“I was arrested night before last. Released yesterday evening. You know Connie Gold and I were shot at in the corridor of the second floor here. She was nicked.” Her wound, which had looked so bloody when Bartoli ministered to it, turned out to be little more than a free-bleeding scratch. “They used my jacket to stop the bleeding. Later they checked my pocket and found a motel phone number in it. They used that as an excuse to lock me up.”
“Why?” He was scowling, nostrils flared, hands bunching into fists. “What’s a motel got to do with anything?”
“It never would have washed anywhere else. But Hillsdale’s got its own rules. Gold had the police check registrations at the motel. Based on a couple of phonies, they claimed the shooter must have stayed there, that the number in my pocket is evidence I hired him.”
He shook his head emphatically. “No way—they can’t make that stick. Why would you want to shoot the DA? It ain’t your ass on the line.” His anger, apparently on my behalf, now seemed directed at me. “It’s mine.”
“The real question is, why would the DA be so unprofessional, so nakedly vindictive toward me?”
Rommel’s lips pinched into a tight line. His eyes narrowed.
“But you know the answer to that.”
“What do you mean?”
“We talked about it at lunch one day, remember? You didn’t want me making an issue of Gold selling TV movie rights.”
He was silent.
“This poses a difficult problem for me, Brad.” It surprised me how much he still looked like the boy who’d outrun a cop car to spare me my family’s wrath, the boy who’d endured a beating and never asked for my thanks or sympathy. He looked a little heavier, perhaps, his skin weather-roughened, more lined, his chin stubbled with a blond shadow. But he still looked like my old friend, my one-time date.
“What problem?” he prompted, when I fell silent.
“Knowing what to do about you.”
“Won’t they let you be my lawyer? Don’t they have to prove you did it?”
“Let me talk for a minute. It might be hard for you not to interrupt, but it’s better if you don’t say anything.”
He scraped his chair back a few inches, hands on the table edge, as if he might leap to his feet. But he said nothing.
“Twice, a man wearing a ski mask shot at me. Once, because I fell, he missed and hit the other person in the room. The second time, because I heard him, I ducked and he nicked Connie Gold.” I watched him. His eyes glinted in a face crimped with anticipation. “I supposed all along it was a hired job. But I didn’t know who’d done the hiring until yesterday. Connie Gold denies it, and I can’t prove it, but she stood over me last night with a gun. The only reason she didn’t kill me is that there were other people close by, and they’d have caught her.”
“Are you serious?”
“They might have caught her either way, of course. But if she’d shot me, they’d have ended up arresting her. By not shooting, well, even if they’d grabbed her, it’s not illegal to be in the woods at night.”
His breathing was labored, audible in the small room. Was he wondering what to ask, what to say? Pondering my advice to remain silent?
“She got away,” I continued. “So it’s my word against hers that she was there at all. And I’m the outsider here, so her word’s being taken over mine. But the bottom line is, last night I realized she was the one who’d hired the man in the ski mask.” I held up my hand, forestalling his next question. “And that made me wonder, who would she trust to do a job like that? She’s the district attorney here; it would ruin her to have any of this get out. She’d have to be damn sure the person would never turn on her. So it would have to be either a trusted friend or someone who owed, or would owe, her a tremendous debt.”
We watched each other across the n
arrow table.
“Here’s my dilemma, Brad. I’m your attorney. I can’t do anything to prejudice your case. My obligation to you has to transcend my suspicions regarding your guilt. I’m obligated to champion, if not truly accept, your version of the facts. But that obligation only extends to the Piatti case. If, for instance, I believed you’d committed another crime or were about to do so, I’d have to turn you in. The rules of ethical conduct are clear on that. But what if turning you in undermined your defense in the Piatti case? Then I’d have two competing obligations: to protect you in the Piatti matter, and to act as an officer of the court and turn you in for the other crime.”
Brad was leaning closer now, his elbows bent, his shoulders hunched. He looked like a coiled spring, his eyes hard and his mouth pursed.
“If I believed you’d made a deal with Connie Gold to kill me in exchange for her ultimately dropping these charges against you, I’d be in a terrible position. Because if you made a deal like that, it could only mean you were guilty. That you’d killed Cathy Piatti, after all. And since I’m representing you in that case, I’m not supposed to do anything to undermine your not-guilty plea.”
“Damn you,” he whispered. “And damn all this lawyer bullshit.” He slammed his fist onto the table top. Louder: “I hate lawyers, you know that? I never met a fish so cold-blooded and slimy as the lawyers I met since I got arrested. You know that?”
“I do know that. I can imagine how you felt when Gold offered you this deal.”
“I’m not saying she did.”
“No, don’t. Don’t say anything; or, at least, don’t admit anything. What we say here this morning may be covered by the lawyer-client privilege … or maybe not. There’s a gray area when it comes to admission of new crimes, crimes other than the one the lawyer’s handling for you. I can’t one-hundred-percent guarantee anything. Especially since— Just take my advice, don’t say anything.”
