Chapter 21

Nina had succeeded in planting the barest seeds of Eric Gainer’s guilt in the jury’s mind, but seeds were all they were. After court, we all went back to her office. During the cab ride I didn’t try to talk to her about what had happened, seeing by the pained look on her face that consolation, especially from me, would only set her teeth on edge. I wanted to tell her she’d done the only thing she could after my father dropped his bombshell and then stuck his foot in his mouth. But I knew it wouldn’t help.

“Can I talk to you?” I said when we arrived at her building. She nodded and we went into her office. She dumped her file box on the desk and began rummaging impatiently inside it, searching for something that seemingly wasn’t there. I told her what Eric had said about planning to testify that Russell Bell had told him that my father had threatened and blackmailed him.

She shrugged, obviously furious with me but too preoccupied with the events of today and the challenges of tomorrow to deal with that now. “I’m not going to let this change how I handle Eric, if they call him. As things are going now, Crowder could afford not to call him and still win. I wouldn’t risk it, if I were her, especially now that I’ve tipped my hand about intending to introduce that picture from the paper. So my attitude has to be that we have nothing to lose.”

Nina ran through her plan, which was to force Eric to choose whether to shelter behind the Fifth Amendment, or explain the sordid mess Russell Bell had made of the semi-heroic act that had launched his career. “And he’ll confess, I’m sure, and then they’ll roll the credits.”

Teddy was waiting in the conference room for me to drive him back to Berkeley. My father and Dot had already gone. But Teddy could just as easily take the BART home as catch a ride with me. I asked Nina if she wanted me to stay and help her prepare for tomorrow.

“No,” she said, her voice becoming a shade warmer than usual. “You’ve been a tremendous help. I would never have been so well prepared without you. What happened today wasn’t your fault. In the heat of the moment, looking for someone to blame, I lashed out at you, but that was wrong of me. You’re a fine lawyer, Leo, and I’d gladly try a case with you again. But now we’re coming into the final push. You’re a cyclist, aren’t you? I know a little bit about the sport. At some point in the big races, the support riders peel off, and ultimately the leader has to go on alone. I need to turn my attention to our closing argument, and that’s a mountain I’ll need to climb without your help. You’d only be a distraction if you stayed. And besides, you need to get Dot ready. We can’t forget to put on our alibi witness.”

I didn’t mind Nina’s thinking of me as a distraction. So I got my pickup out of the parking deck and drove Teddy home.

Talking to her, I’d come to realize what I’d suspected all along—that I never again wished to play the role of bystander in a criminal trial. I didn’t want my heart rate tracking another lawyer’s examinations, the questions I would have asked constantly leaping to my throat. To be fair, her courtroom performance had been first-rate. She’d leapt into openings I’d have missed, and she’d missed few opportunities to turn the state’s evidence in our favor. She’d made judgment calls when she’d needed to make them, and I couldn’t argue with her attempt to turn Bell’s death to our purposes. She’d had to make that bet.

I dropped Teddy at his house. Tamara and the baby had been back there since early afternoon. Jeanie was with them. They’d picked up Chinese takeout, and I shared it with them, eating on the couch in front of the TV. Jeanie wanted to hear how the trial had gone today, but neither Teddy nor I was in any mood to talk about it. When the food was gone, I drove home.

~ ~ ~

I called Dot’s number, spoke briefly to my father, then asked him to put Dot on the line. We ran through her brief examination several times. Before today, Nina hadn’t planned to call her to testify, but now we had no choice. Nina was dead set against returning my father to the stand and exposing him to another round of cross-examination. That left Dot to testify regarding his whereabouts the morning of the murder. We would also be using her as a character witness, asking her to testify to my father’s gentle nature during the time they’d been engaged.

After I finished with Dot, I meant to go to bed early. But then Tanya called around eleven. “You’re in luck,” she said. “Sherrie was suspicious at first, but I talked her into it. I told her your regular girl was out of town and someone had recommended her. Only the price is going to be eight hundred.”

The address Tanya gave me was a six-story apartment building in the Sunset, three blocks from Ocean Beach. When I got there, I went up the steps and punched in the apartment number to the intercom. The door buzzed and I went in.

I took the elevator up. The fourth floor was divided into three apartments, one in front and two in back. The door to the front one was ajar. Light spilled into the hallway.

“I told you not to look for me,” a jaded voice said.

She was sitting on a low armchair. The light came from a lamp beside her. Her legs were crossed in fishnets and a short skirt, and she wore a push-up top beneath a denim jacket. Her hair was blond, brushed severely back. She was still beautiful, but I saw the lines of strain that had formed in her cheeks. She was expensively dressed and looked very different from the person I’d driven to Mendocino and back. Unmistakably, however, it was her.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I know it was a cheap trick, getting you to come here, but I had to see you again.”

She glanced around the room. “What you pulled tonight is just what Russell did. She hadn’t even heard about him getting out of prison. No one bothered to tell her. So she walked into a trap.”

Her stare was intense. At the back of my neck I felt a prickling sensation. Eric had never seen the body, according to what he’d told me. He didn’t know which girl had fallen from the railing and which one had survived, which was the victim and which one had set him up. “You’re Lucy,” an instinct made me say. “You leaked that picture to the paper. Eric thought you were dead, but you’re the one who’s been blackmailing him.”

She uncrossed her legs and leaned back, pressing her arms beneath her small breasts. “Lucy’s dead, just like I told you. Russell Bell killed her. That’s how it has to be. What did you want to see me for? Not for a fuck, I hope.”

I came into the room and sat in the matching armchair next to hers. She put a hand on my leg and leaned over the arm of her chair onto mine. I felt a wave of heat go through me, triggered by the scent of her perfume. It was like she’d flipped a switch; sex was suddenly thick in the air. “Listen to me. I think Jackson Gainer had Russell killed to cover up Lucy’s murder. Eric’s protecting him.” If she hadn’t killed Russell, that is. The possibility suddenly presented itself to me, so obvious now that I knew who she was. Because who had a better motive than she did?

“That’s because Eric Gainer knows he could never pick up a gun, pump bullets into a man.” She sighted along an imaginary gun, pumped the arm four times as if with the effect of a weapon’s recoil. “He’s the kind that keeps his back turned while others are doing the dirty work.”

Everything clicked into place, the possibility becoming more certain. I chose to test it. “I’d love to have seen the look in Russell’s eyes when Lucy shot him.” My eyes went to the small purse she clutched under her arm. Inside, I guessed, might be the gun that had killed Russell Bell. The key to my father’s freedom, if I’d been a cop, and if this new suspicion was correct. My heart raced at the thought that the answer, at last, might be at hand.

She rose, her hand on the purse toying with the zipper, and began to pace the room. She could have the gun out in an instant, if it was in there. “Lucy didn’t shoot Bell,” she said. “I was going to do it for her, but someone got to him before I did. I guess Jackson decided he’d rather kill him than pay him. I was going to shoot him after he got paid, not before.” She stopped and turned, her eyes sliding off every surface, flitting away from me. “What would be the point of that?”

She went on, pacing again. “Lucy was like Eric, in a way. She always counted on her friends to be strong for her. But unlike Eric Gainer, she always chose the wrong friends, ones that took advantage of her. This time was no different. I was never Lucy’s friend, though I pretended to be. Actually, I hated her. I just hated Russell Bell more.”

She stopped before me, looking down as if daring me to contradict her. I supposed the idea was that the repetition of the sexual torture and abuse she’d endured in her childhood had fractured her personality into at least two discordant pieces. Then she’d snapped and given Bell the justice he deserved, a justice that the legal system had been unable or unwilling to deliver. Maybe that’s what had happened. The trouble was I couldn’t read her. I was no psychologist, but I was under the impression that science had debunked the idea that any such thing as multiple personality disorder truly existed outside the sufferer’s imagination.

I held up my hands. “You want Gainer. Right now you’re biding your time, but the chance you’re waiting for isn’t going to come. He’s surrounded by lawyers. They’ve got their stories matched. Eric thinks he’s protecting Jackson and Jackson’s protecting him. Right now, the element of surprise is on your side. According to Eric, Russell told him that he stashed the body in the freezer downstairs at Chen’s house. Eric doesn’t know the body isn’t yours.”

She turned midpace and stared at me with dawning comprehension. “You’re trying to set me up. Your father’s on trial for murder and you want me to confess to something I didn’t do, so that you can blame me instead of him.”

“No,” I told her. “I haven’t been able to put the right kind of pressure on Gainer. Moral pressure, I mean. That’s the only kind a man like Eric is susceptible to. Russell killed you, he thinks, and he’s convinced that Jackson killed Russell. If you surprised him, you could put the right kind of pressure on him, get him to tell the truth about what he thinks Jackson did. If he did that, then my father would be off the hook. And so would Lucy.”

“Moral pressure? Eric Gainer? Are you kidding me? The man doesn’t have a moral bone in his body. And your father’s the son of a bitch who got Russell out of prison.”

She was working herself up to something.

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” I said, seeing the danger I was in. I needed to cut this short now and get out of there.

“I wish you were sorry.” Her hand was still on the bag’s zipper.

“I’m going,” I said, moving toward the door, not turning my back to her. Then I was through it, and I let out my held breath. I didn’t wait for the elevator, but hurried down the stairs two at a time and out to the street. When I looked up, she was at the window, staring down.

I was home after two, and slightly closer to an answer than I’d been before tonight, now that I knew that Lucy Rivera was alive. What I didn’t know was whether she’d killed Russell or merely been victimized by him again. Rather than go over and over in my mind what I’d just seen and heard, I spent the hours between 2:00 and 4:00 am in front of my computer trying to focus on making an outline for Nina to rely on in her examination of Eric Gainer.