‘I can tell you it has nothing to do with us.’
‘You go out in the middle of the night and stay out until God knows when and I don’t even get a hint of an explanation?’
‘Frannie, no. It doesn’t have to do with us. It’s confidential, attorney-client -’
‘Well, la di da. And whose attorney are you? I thought you worked for the city.’ She had him there, but he had made his decision. He had all sorts of conflicting loyalties. ‘This job is changing you,’ she said.
Maybe. Life changed people, big deal, live with it. But he wasn’t stupid enough to say that. Instead he’d gone off to work with the stomachache he got every time they fought.
And now Andy Fowler had told his daughter, or she’d wheedled it out of him. But either way, here was another person – and not the soul of discretion – who knew.
‘I didn’t do anything to him, Jane. If anything, he did it to himself.’
‘You didn’t have to tell anybody!’
‘I didn’t tell anybody. I haven’t told anybody, at least not yet. I hope I won’t have to.’
‘Have to? My, aren’t we getting sanctimonious here.’
Hardy’s door was open. He told Jane to hang on and he got up to close it. Pullios was coming down the hallway, deep in conference with Chris Locke. His stomach tightened further and he shut the door before they saw him.
Back at the phone, he asked Jane if Big Chuck – he’d taken to thinking of her new boyfriend as Big Chuck – if Big Chuck had been there, too, when Andy had told her.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I think it means I don’t have to take any abuse from you, so leave me alone.’
He hung up.
There were lots of ways to do it, and Freeman naturally chose the most flamboyant. Well, perhaps not altogether naturally. The inclination to do things with flair, while meshing well with his personality, had been drummed out of him in law school, but over the years of private practice he had put it back in.
In the first years of his practice he would have taken evidence he had dug up (such as the Strauss boys’ corroboration of May’s alibi) and brought it into the D.A.‘s office, where it would be discussed and some decision would be made about whether it eliminated the need for a trial.
But over the long run he had found that this cooperative attitude did little for him. Prosecutors often disbelieved what he brought them, doubted its truth or relevance, impugning his motives while they were at it. He had found that if he did it only sparingly, when his findings were unambiguous and, as in this case, critical, a public airing of evidence had a way of getting more action out of the D.A. than any attempt at amity, goodwill and cooperation. District attorneys, he had found, were acutely sensitive to public perception – more so, often, than to justice.
A news conference made hairs stand up in the Hall, made young lawyers (and even a few old ones) fear you – a force who dared go outside the system if he had to. They’d call him a loose cannon, and watch out, guys. Loose cannons go boom.
He stood now in the lobby of his office, surrounded by a totally unnecessary phalanx of some of his associates he’d sent home earlier to put on their best threads. He himself was as rumpled as usual in an old brown tweed and scuffed wing tips.
In front of him was a makeshift podium with several microphones. Opposite the podium, facing him, stood a knot of some fifteen reporters, which was a pretty fair showing, considering the short lead time he’d given them. There were three sound trucks double-parked in the street outside, which meant he’d be on television. KGO radio was represented – so he’d get some sound bites on the most popular talk station.
May was a good sport about it. He told her it was time to collect on his advertising fee. He’d come to admire her quite a bit, especially after finding out she had probably been telling him the truth the whole time. Now she was standing next to him, not yet daring to smile, flawlessly turned out as usual.
His fingers did a little tap dance over the microphones and he smiled. Gosh, he wasn’t used to all of this, regular old working stiff that he was. Were these things on? He spoke extemporaneously. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to thank you all for coming here today and I won’t take much of your very valuable time. As you know, a couple of weeks ago Owen Nash, one of the giants of American business, was felled by a gunshot. No one would deny that Mr Nash was a powerful and fascinating man.’
He glanced at May Shinn and got another bonus. At the mention of Nash’s name, a tear had sprung from her eyes and was rolling down her cheek. Don’t wipe it, he thought to himself. A couple of bulbs flashed.
Freeman took her hand, gave it a squeeze. ‘In cases like this, there seems to be a natural inclination to fasten guilt on somebody, to lay the blame somewhere. Who can say why? It could be it satisfies society’s need for order. Maybe our outrage is so great we crave any action that seems to redress the great wrong that murder represents.
‘How many of us, in our heart of hearts, blame Jack Ruby for killing Lee Harvey Oswald? No, when the King falls, the King’s killer must, in turn, be killed. Of course, I’m not comparing Owen Nash to our martyred president. Like Dan Quayle, Owen Nash was no Jack Kennedy.’
He waited for the laughter, stole a glance at May and squeezed her hand again. ‘But Owen Nash was, in his own way, a Titan. And there was that same rush to judgment.
‘Unfortunately, in this case, that rush centered upon the person who now stands here on my right, May Shinn, a natural American citizen, a woman with no criminal record of any kind, a woman whose sole fault, if it is one, was to become involved with, to fall in love with, Owen Nash.
‘In a perfect world the district attorney would never have even condoned the kind of public vigilantism that has been the earmark of this case from the beginning. It is, however, a sad fact that this is not a perfect world and that our own district attorney’s office was from the beginning in the forefront of the racist witchhunt that brought this young woman to the dock without a shred of physical evidence that could implicate her in this horrible deed.’
He stopped, enjoying a minute of eye contact with the journalists and reporters. He had them.
‘From the beginning, Ms Shinn has contended that on the day Owen Nash was brutally murdered she stayed home, waiting for his return. She did not use the telephone. She did not go out to buy a newspaper. She did not play the piano or hammer nails in her wall or sing in the shower. I submit to you all that this is not criminal behavior.
‘And yet, ladies and gentlemen, and let me make this very clear, this was the sum total of the people’s case against May Shinn. That she did nothing to make anyone notice she was home! Imagine that! Time was when that would have been the mark of a good citizen, an ideal neighbor. But because she is of Japanese descent, because she dared have a relationship with a powerful man’ – he lowered his voice – ‘because she was, in fact, a woman powerless to defend herself against the might of the state, she was the perfect scapegoat. She spent a quiet day at home and she is suspected, indeed, accused, of murder.
‘I’d like now to introduce you to two young men – Nick and Alex Strauss – who happen to live directly across the street from Ms Shinn’s apartment.’
He nodded to one of his associates, who went into the adjoining room and brought out the two boys and their father.
‘If the district attorney had been interested in the truth, he too could have found the Strauss boys. They got back from a trip to Europe on June twentieth, the day Owen Nash was killed. You’ll never guess what they saw.’
35
He was getting a Diet Coke in the lounge, when one of the guys two doors down, Constantino, stuck his head in.
‘Hardy, you better get to Drysdale’s,’ he said.
It was five minutes to three. Drysdale had gotten a tip from one of his connections at KRON, and now Pullios, Chris Locke himself and a third of the rest of the staff were gathered in front of the television set. Hardy squeezed himself into the doorway, reminded of other gatherings like this – the day Dan White had killed Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone at City Hall, the Reagan assassination attempt. He wondered who’d been shot.
Somebody called out. ‘Okay, okay, it’s on, turn it up.’ The room went quiet, except for the anchor’s voice, talking about an exceptional development in the Owen Nash murder case, and in a minute there was David Freeman on the screen in front of a bunch of microphones, May Shinn beside him.