“You didn’t know her, Mr. Carl. She wasn’t like that. In the end it was bitter, true, but he was the father of her daughter. She was too sweet to have wanted him in prison forever for something he didn’t do.”
She was right about one thing, at least, I didn’t know Leesa Dubé, didn’t know the first thing about her, and was wrong to imply a viciousness that might not have been there.
“So if this is what Leesa would have wanted,” I said, “then for some reason you must believe he’s not guilty?”
“I’m running late.”
I leaned forward, examined her closely. “You really do, don’t you?”
She snapped her bag closed, stood. “I have an appointment. Take the money, Mr. Carl. Do what you can for François.”
“You know something.”
“I need to go.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“I can’t, please, believe me. I simply can’t.”
And it was there, just for a single precious moment, there, behind the mask, the swollen lips and frownless forehead, the perfect hair, the perfect skin, the blue contact lenses. There, behind the finest facade that money could buy, I saw something striking. It was the woman she had been, the woman who had gotten the tattoo and palled around with Leesa Dubé before falling into a morass of money that seemed to have swallowed her whole. This woman was wild, wildly ambitious, this woman was too smart by half for what she had become. And there, yes there, I could spy some terrible burden in her eyes. Was it sadness? Was it regret? Was it, perhaps, a crushing guilt that was tearing her apart?
It would be interesting to find out, wouldn’t it?
I reached over, took the envelope, riffled through the bills. “You understand, Mrs. Takahashi,” I said as I performed my quick count, “that this retainer covers only our motion. If we are successful, we’ll need another retainer to handle the trial.”
“Then let’s hope we meet again.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s hope.” Let’s hope indeedy. “My secretary will give you a receipt for the cash.”
“I don’t need a receipt.”
“Maybe you don’t, but I still need to give you one. We have a rule here, anyone who drops off a load of cash and isn’t given a receipt gets a free frozen yogurt his next visit.”
I walked her out of my office, waited behind her while Ellie typed up a receipt, smelled her rich, sweet scent, felt myself swoon. See, even with all the lies she had told, even with all the enhancements to her beauty, I couldn’t help but breathe in her fragrance and feel my stomach flutter. Let me tell you true, the only thing more enticing than raw natural beauty is rampant, raging artificiality.
Back in my office, I pulled the wad out of the envelope, fanned the bills just for the feel of it, and then performed a more careful count. I wasn’t beyond running down the street, calling out Oh, Mrs. Takahashi, Mrs. Takahashi if she was so much as a twenty short. But she wasn’t short. Ten thousand dollars. Not a bad way to start the day.
I pulled a card out of my shirt pocket. My share would be enough to pay for a visit to the dentist, I figured, even without insurance. I could now afford to have Dr. Pfeffer, miracle worker, perform a miracle on my tooth. But wouldn’t you know it? My tooth was suddenly feeling so much better. Money has that way, doesn’t it, of easing your worldly pains? So maybe the ache was more existential than dental, maybe it had less to do with the condition of my tooth and more with the sad condition of my life. And the answer might be to dig into the past of the very wealthy Velma Takahashi instead of digging into my gums. I put the card away and put in a call to my detective, Phil Skink.
It was getting interesting, this case I didn’t want, this futile motion on behalf of a defendant I disliked. First Whitney Robinson had grabbed hold of me at the end of our meeting and, whispering as if every word he said were being overheard, had begged me to leave this case be. For your own sake, he had said, whatever that meant. You can’t imagine the price, he had said, though he didn’t say the price for whom. And then Velma Takahashi, as pretty and as false as the Vargas pinups I had drooled over as an adolescent, Velma Takahashi had dropped a wad of bills on my desk and begged me to help François Dubé, even as she held back, for reasons of her own, a secret about the murder. It was getting oh, so interesting. All I needed now was a way to convince the judge to overturn a guilty verdict three years old, the appeals of which had all been denied, and where no new evidence or new suspects had emerged. It would be a hell of a trick.
And damn if I didn’t know where to start.
9
“His name was Seamus Dent,” I said to Beth as we drove north through the city. “He was the witness who put François Dubé at the scene of the crime.”
We were heading into an insular, working-class part of town. North of Kensington, south of Center City, hard by the river, a piece of Philadelphia but a place all its own. The name pretty much said it alclass="underline" union town, scrapple town, tavern town, Fishtown.
“I thought you told me he was dead,” said Beth. “It sounds like whatever use he could have been to us in getting a new trial died with him.”
“You would think. Except Whit told me something that grabbed my attention. Apparently Seamus was killed during a drug deal not too long after he testified. But drug use wasn’t brought up in his cross-examination.”
“You think your friend Whit might have missed something at trial?”
“I don’t know. The kid had no record, but you’re not clean one day and mixed up in some drug deal gone bad the next. Why was he on the street that night? What was he looking for? Was he using at the time? All that stuff could have destroyed his credibility on cross. And because he was admittedly in the neighborhood, and maybe desperate for a fix, he might have become a suspect himself.”
“But even if true, that won’t be enough to get François a new trial, will it?”
“That’s the thing. The case law is pretty clear. You can’t use new evidence that might have affected the credibility of a witness to get a new trial.”
“So what’s the point?”
“Something just doesn’t seem right here, does it? Why didn’t Whit know? Who was hiding what? I have a feeling, that’s all. Do you have a better place to start?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “But it’s not much of a start.”
“Well, Beth, to tell you the truth, it’s not much of a case.”
We pulled into a narrow residential street with mismatched houses jammed cheek by jowl into an eclectic row. I checked the notes I’d made, searched the addresses on the buildings, found the house I was looking for. I parked right in front.
As I was ringing the bell of a small gray row house, a woman sitting on a stoop three doors down called out, “Who you here for?”
I stepped back, eyed the gray house up and down as I said, “We’re looking for a Mrs. Dent.”
“What you want with her?”
“We’ve got some questions.”
“What about?”
I turned to the woman who spoke to me, annoyed at her prying. She was young, heavy, wearing a blue smock. Beside her sat another woman, rail thin, with short red hair, her elbows on her knees, staring at me with unblinking eyes as she smoked a cigarette. A third woman sat on the step above them. Three nosy neighbors, spending their days talking about laundry soaps and passing recipes, neighborhood gossip, the occasional bottle. I squinted and considered them carefully. A regular coffee klatch, sometimes just the thing when you’re looking for information.
“We want to ask her about her son,” I said, glancing once more at the nonresponsive house before walking over to them, Beth at my side.