“It’s okay,” I said. “Never mind that. What about you? Where were you, that night?”
“Home.”
“At your mom’s.”
He nodded.
“Was anyone with you? Your mom? Was she there?”
He scratched his chin. “I can’t remember.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “You’re doing great. So you’re home. Dr. Rennert shows up.”
“Yes sir. He said to get in the car.”
“He took you someplace in the city, in San Francisco. Is that right?”
“Yes sir. I was there the one night and then doctor said we got to go. The man got hurt, he didn’t want nobody thinking I did it to him.”
“Did he explain what had happened?”
He hesitated.
“Did the two of them have an argument?” I asked.
Again, Triplett looked to Crahan.
“Up to you,” Crahan said.
Triplett said, “He shot him.”
I said, “Renn — Dr. Rennert told you that?”
“No sir. I heard him tell the lady when we was at the house.”
“Lydia,” I said. When Triplett regarded me blankly: “That was the name of the woman whose house you stayed at, Lydia. You overheard Dr. Rennert tell her he’d shot Linstad?”
“Yes sir.”
“Shot him, or shot at him.”
Triplett made a helpless face.
“It’s all right, Julian,” Weatherfeld said. “It was a long time ago.”
She gave me a warning look, and I relented. “We can leave it there for now.”
Triplett’s hands had resumed their fitful dance.
He said, “He was a nice man, too.”
“Dr. Rennert cared a lot about you,” I said. “And I know you cared about him.”
But Triplett was shaking his head. “The other one.”
I grasped his intention. “Linstad?”
“Yes sir,” Triplett said. “He was always nice to me.”
He showed no trace of bitterness. Had Rennert given him the whole truth? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps, over time, Walter Rennert arrived at the same conclusion that I had, after years of dealing with death: truth, like any vital substance, can be fatal in large doses.
If Julian Triplett could suffer his ordeal while retaining his humanity — his quiet, somber grace — by what right did Rennert or I or anyone else interfere?
Crahan said, “You said you can prove he’s innocent.”
I said, “I can try.”
“How?”
“First thing I need is for Julian to take a DNA test,” I said. To Triplett: “It’s your choice. Nothing’s going to happen if you decide not to do it.”
Crahan said, “We got a lot to think about. Right, JT?”
Karen Weatherfeld said, “Maybe we should let Julian rest.”
She got to her feet, waited for me to follow suit.
“One last thing, before I go,” I said. “I’m going to need you to give me back the other item you took from Dr. Rennert’s house.”
Triplett stared at his twitching hands.
“Nobody’s mad,” I said. “But it belongs to someone who wants it back.”
Triplett said nothing.
“JT?” Crahan said.
“Yeah,” Triplett said. “Okay.”
He got up — I felt the floor dip beneath me — and pointed to a kitchen drawer.
“Excuse me,” he said.
Weatherfeld and I backed out of his way.
The drawer housed a variety of woodworking tools: X-Acto knives, chisels, files. Buried in the mix was Walter Rennert’s .38.
Triplett picked it up by the butt. Pinched in his fingers, it looked like a toy.
Weatherfeld sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh, Julian,” she said softly.
Crahan was on his feet now, too, scowling. “The hell you got that for?”
Triplett shrugged.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You got scared and you grabbed it.”
Triplett nodded.
“We both know you wouldn’t use it.”
“No sir.”
“You don’t need it anymore, though. Right? You’re safe. So can I have it, please?”
Triplett offered me the gun, barrel-first.
“Thanks,” I said, taking it carefully. “I want you to know this, okay? You don’t have to be scared anymore.”
He thought it over awhile, then nodded. “Okay.”
I smiled. “Good.”
We started to go, but Triplett stopped us: “Hold on.”
He rooted in the avocado box, coming up with a piece of wood he liked. Selecting a knife from the tool drawer, he began rapidly to whittle.
He worked inches from me, like a close-up magician. I couldn’t tell what he was making; it was lost in his huge hands. He paused but briefly to inspect the piece from a new angle before resuming with swift, short strokes, shavings spiraling to the floor. The tremors had left him, and he was steady and confident. I could hear the whisper of the blade. His big chest moved up and down like the tide.
Crahan looked on fondly. Karen Weatherfeld watched, rapt.
The strokes slowed. Ceased.
Julian set the knife in the drawer, exchanging it for a crumpled square of sandpaper. He gave the piece several quick wipes, blew dust into the sink, regarded his handiwork with a satisfied smile.
A sunflower.
Start to finish, it had taken him perhaps three minutes.
“Twenty bucks,” Crahan said, “and it’s all yours.”
Triplett pressed the carving into my palm. For an instant his flesh touched mine, and what I felt was smooth and warm, strong and heavy and present, impossible to ignore.
“Kara,” he said.
I said, “I’ll make sure she gets it.”
Chapter 42
Nine weeks later, on a balmy Tuesday afternoon, I met Nate Schickman in the lobby of Boalt Hall, the main law school building.
He was in uniform. I was not, though I’d put on a decent shirt. No jacket: spring had arrived on campus, overnight. When I was a student, my friends and I had a term for it — that moment when you looked up and noticed that the mud had unfolded into grass, and girls went out in tank tops and shorts. We called it The Day.
The Institute for Wrongful Convictions operated out of room 373, also the office of Yount Professor of Law and Criminal Justice Michelle George Berkowitz.
The door was ajar. Schickman rapped the frame.
“Come in.”
I saw Michelle Berkowitz and thought: assumptions.
She was a petite black woman with regal cheekbones and sculpted eyebrows. Tight braids lined her scalp, blossoming into an auburn cloud at the base of her neck. Stacks of photocopies, forms, folders, textbooks, journals — the stuff of appeals-in-progress — cluttered the floor and bookcases. The desk itself was clean, save a laptop whose wallpaper showed her with a white man and a grinning braces-faced girl of about eleven, the trio mugging in leis.
She told us to sit.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet,” I said.
“How could I not?” She spoke with a Caribbean lilt. “The curiosity was overpowering. You must realize how rare it is to be approached by the police. In fact, it’s never happened in the eleven years I’ve run this clinic.”
“First time for everything,” Schickman said.
“Mm.” An inscrutable smile. “Let’s begin with the same question I would ask Mr. Triplett himself: what’s your goal?”
“To clear his name,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “But to what end?”
Schickman glanced at me. I won’t say we’d been expecting a hero’s welcome, but her leeriness caught us off guard.
“Legally, your options are limited,” she said. “He’s no longer incarcerated. We could pursue a pardon, but in this instance any potential practical benefits are, in my view, outweighed by the potential costs. So the question then becomes one of personal or psychological benefit. From what you’ve described to me, he’s living quite contentedly.”