"It's too late for that, Jedd. It's started without him. Now the trick is to contain the damage. And if he doesn't show up on his lawyer's arm in the next few hours, everything from here on out is going to be much worse. You know that."
"I know that. You know it. Do you want me to call him first? Try to talk some sense into him. At least he'll probably pick up if it's me."
"There's a heartening thought." Gina considered for a second. "All right, but promise you'll get right back to me."
"As soon as I'm off, regardless of what he says. I'll give it my best shot."
"I know you will. And Jedd?"
"Yo."
"Not that I didn't appreciate it and all, but next time you've got an innocent man referral for me to defend, maybe you'll want to resist the urge."
At seven thirty that night, with no dinner inside her, Gina was driving south on the Bayshore Freeway on the way to San Mateo, where Stuart was staying near Coyote Point in Room 29 of the Hollywood Motel. Jedd Conley hadn't had any luck changing Stuart's mind, and neither had Gina in a second long talk with her client from her apartment. In spite of that, she still entertained some hope that the face-to-face discussion she'd talked him into might make him come around.
But the knot in her stomach and nervous tic in one of her eyelids were better indicators of her odds.
Dusk was well-advanced by the time she knocked quietly on the door, which faced a two-lane road perpendicular to the freeway and along the edge of San Mateo's municipal golf course. A light was visible in the room through the venetian blinds; a shadow moved across it in response to her knock, and then she was standing looking up at her client, who had his cell phone to his ear, motioning her in, closing the door behind her.
"My daughter," he mouthed all but silently.
Nodding, Gina moved into the room and sat in a chair beside a linoleum table against the wall. The room was large, with two queen beds and a half-kitchen behind her in the back. Stuart went back to the near bed and sat propped with the pillows he'd piled against the headboard.
"That wasn't your fault, hon," Stuart said. "That was between your mother and me. It didn't have anything to do with you."
Gina watched her client as he listened some more, his face a mask of pain and regret. Grimacing at something his daughter was saying, he brought his free hand up to the birthmark near his eye and rubbed it mechanically. "That's just how she was with everybody. No, especially the people she cared about. She was just one of those insecure people who needed what she did to matter more than who she was. So if she wasn't accomplishing something… I don't know… something tangible, like her inventions or her operations… well, the rest of it didn't have as much meaning to her. Yeah. That was me, too. Well, of course it hurt, but by that time you and I were just getting in her way. I know she was your mother, hon. I know it's not fair…"
Stuart looked across at Gina, gave her a distracted nod and held up a finger, asking for another minute or two. Nodding, she half listened to a long-suffering father trying to explain the inexplicable to his devastated daughter. With something of a shock, she suddenly saw the handgun in full view out on the stand under the reading light between the two beds. To take her eyes off it, and to give Stuart a bit more privacy with Kymberly, Gina stood up and walked back into the half-kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of water.
The sight of the gun had roiled her stomach anew and, now having drunk the water, she put the glass down and leaned against the counter, arms straight and with her weight on her hands, her face up, her eyes closed. She exhaled heavily, telling herself that the sudden stab of nerves was irrational, yet recognizing it for what it was. It was fear.
What had she been thinking?
Before in her life, she had only defended guilty suspects, and now here she was alone with her client and his gun, with a warrant out for his arrest for a murder.
Drawing a deep breath, her eyes still closed, she sighed again.
The words seemed to explode in her ear, directly behind her. "Are you all right?"
She brought a hand to her chest and whirled on him. "Oh my God. You scared me to death."
"I'm sorry." He flicked on the kitchen light overhead, the blessed brightness dissipating the shadows. "And I'm sorry about the phone. I had to talk to Kymberly."
"I heard. She's having a rough time?"
"My heart's breaking for her. She doesn't understand why Caryn didn't love her. She wants to have a chance to ask her one time. What she did wrong."
"What Kym did wrong? Why would she think she did anything wrong?"
"It's a little circular, isn't it? Because her mother had stopped loving her. It wasn't just Kym not saying good-bye to Caryn when she left to go to college. Caryn didn't make any effort to say good-bye to her, either. She was all just 'Thank God that's over and she's gone. Now I can get on with my life.' "
"Was she that hard, really? Kym?"
Stuart searched the corners of the ceiling for an answer. He ran a hand through his hair. "I don't have anything to compare Kym to. Maybe all kids are hard on their parents, or their marriages. All I can say is she sucked the energy out of both of us. I kept thinking… we both thought that somehow it was our fault. That we'd spoiled her. But really, I don't think it was that. From the beginning, she was just so hard."
"But isn't that the norm?" Gina asked. "Everybody says once you have kids, your life is never the same."
Stuart met Gina's eyes. "That's true, but there are degrees. Most of our friends, back when we had mutual friends, they'd joke about how their lives had changed. But there was always good to go with the bad. With us, from early on, it was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. You know, Kym didn't sleep through the night until she was four years old! You know how tired you get with four years of no sleep? She was in diapers until she was almost eight. I mean…" But he couldn't find the words. He shook his head, trying to shake the memories. "Sorry."
"There's nothing to be sorry about. It must have been difficult."
He almost laughed. "Difficult's a good word. So now, how am I supposed to console her? She drove her mother away. That's the truth. She wore us both down until Caryn just gave up. Maybe she would have come back to caring about Kym after she wasn't living with us full-time anymore, but now Caryn will never get the chance for that. And it's just killing my little girl." Suddenly, he checked himself, apologetic. "But you didn't come all the way down here to talk about Kym."
"I'm happy to talk about Kym. Whatever you want. Obviously you're still trying."
He shrugged. "What am I going to do? She's my daughter. I love her. But Lord, sometimes you wonder when it's going to get better. If things are ever going to improve."
Gina was leaning back against the counter in the narrow kitchen. "Maybe the first step is believing that they can."
He gave her a weak facsimile of a smile. "That would be a pretty thing to think." Then, perhaps not meaning to sound so dismissive, he added, "But maybe you're right."
"I am right, Stuart. It happened with me. A year ago I would have told you I was a lost cause. I'm not. Change is not only possible, it's the only possibility." Gina had him listening, and she pressed on. "You know, Stuart," she began, "you're the one who told me you don't want to live with suspicion hanging over you for the rest of your life. Has it ever occurred to you that getting legally cleared, getting an acquittal, is the best way to put that suspicion behind you, once and for all?"
"You want to ask O.J. about that?" "He's the exception that proves the rule."
"Okay, but who's to say there won't be another exception? Or, worse, I'm the innocent guy who pulls life in prison for the crime he didn't commit. No thanks."
"And so you think this-what you're doing now-is helping your case?"
"You mean doing my own investigation?"