The King of Lies

  I pictured the old man staring down at me from his lofty height, a twist of distaste on his patrician mouth. But just because Hambly believed it didn’t make it so. That’s what Douglas would argue to the jury. I could hear him: I would never doubt the word of this upstanding gentleman. He would beam at the jury and place a hand on the old man’s shoulder to show that they were on the same side. I am quite certain that he never discussed the will with this defendant. He’d stop and point his meaty finger, damning me. But there are other ways, ladies and gentlemen. And the defendant is a smart man, an educated man. Here he’d raise his voice. A lawyer! Who for ten years shared an office with the decedent. Who for thirty-five years had access to the poor man’s home. . . . His own father!

  That’s how he’d play it. It’s how I would. He’d need a motive.

  Fifteen million dollars, ladies and gentlemen. A lot of money . . .

  “And don’t forget the obvious,” the reporter said. “They still don’t have a murder weapon. It’s a big hole.”

  Not as big as the one in my father’s head, I thought, amazed at my own callousness. If anything, my dislike for the man had grown since his death. “Is there anything else?” I asked.

  “One more thing,” she told me. “It’s important.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think you did it. That’s why we’re talking. Don’t make me regret it.”

  I understood what she meant. If word escaped that she’d told me these things, her sources would dry up. She could face criminal charges.

  “I understand,” I told her.

  “Listen, Work. I like you. You’re like a little boy playing dress-up. Don’t get caught with your pants down. It wouldn’t be the same without you. I mean that.”

  Unsure what to say, I thanked her.

  “And when the time is right,” she said, “you talk to me and me only. If there’s a story, I want an exclusive.”

  “Whatever you want, Tara.”

  I heard her light another cigarette. She muttered something under her breath. Then her voice firmed.

  “This last bit’s going to hurt, Work, and I apologize. But it’s out of my hands.”

  A horrible pit opened in my stomach, and I felt my heart drop through it. I knew what she was going to say before she said it. “Don’t, Tara,” I said. “Don’t do it.”

  “It’s my editor’s call, Work. The story’s going to run. It won’t be specific, if that helps. Sources close to the investigation say . . . that sort of thing. It won’t say you’re a suspect, just that you’re being questioned in connection with the murder.”

  “But you’ll use my name?”

  “I can buy you a day, Work, maybe two, but don’t count on it. It’s going to run and it will be front page.”

  I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Thanks for nothing.”

  After a long silence, Tara said, “I didn’t have to tell you at all.”

  “I know. It doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “I gotta go, Work. Take care.” She hung up.

  I sat in silence for a long time, thinking of what she’d said. I tried to picture it, the train wreck that was now bearing down on me, but I couldn’t. The next day, or the day after that. It was too huge, too intense. I thought of the other things she’d said—because I had to. I absolutely had to.

  Black Talons. They were hard to come by. That Ezra’s own gun had been used against him now seemed a certainty. I thought of my last visit to his house, of the bed upstairs and the place where someone had curled up to rest or to weep. Jean had been there, looking for some kind of peace, I guessed. It was where it had started, on the night that now seemed so long ago. She would have gone there for the gun; we all knew that’s where he kept it. How many times, I wondered, had she returned to that place, and what did she think while there? Would she undo the past if she could?

  Then there was the fifteen million. No one would believe I had no use for it. It would appear to be an obvious and self-serving lie. And the cops knew that I’d not been home with Barbara. That presented a huge question. Where had that information come from? Suddenly, I thought of Jean, how her mouth had worked wetly beneath those kaleidoscope eyes. . . . Done is done. . . . Daddy’s dead and done is done.

  But I couldn’t keep my mind off Tara. Why was she helping me? What was it she’d said? That I was like “a little boy playing dress-up.” That’s how she saw me, a little boy in his father’s suit. She was right, I realized, but for the wrong reasons. It looked like dress-up because my father’s suit would never fit. The problem, however, was not the size of the man, but the choice of suit, a truth I was gradually coming to accept. The vultures were circling, looking for a carcass, a body to feed the clanking machine that was justice. And I knew for fact that my father could never have put himself in the sights. He could never have made that sacrifice. I prayed that I would be strong enough to do what had to be done. I pictured my sister, and found that it helped. But the panic was still there, waiting, and I pushed the thoughts away, pounded them down with something like hatred.

  Jean was right. The old man was dead, and done is done. Only one thing mattered now.

  I leaned back in the chair I’d used for so many years and studied the walls, where diplomas and my law license hung; I saw the office as if for the first time. There were no personal touches, no paintings or photographs, not even of my wife. It was as if a part of me had never accepted my life, and saw this all as merely temporary. Yet if that were true, it was a small part of me indeed. Until that moment, it had all seemed normal enough. Yet I knew I could move out of that office in five minutes, and it would be as if the past ten years had never been. The room would show little change. Like a prison cell, I thought. The building wouldn’t miss me, and part of me wanted to torch the place. For what could it matter now? One cell was much the same as another.

  There should be pictures on the walls, I thought, then placed a call to Stolen Farm. I told myself I was calling to apologize, to try one more time to set the past to rights, but that was not the whole truth. I needed to hear her voice. I wanted to hear her say that she loved me, just one more time.

  No one answered.

  By the time I left for court, the day had closed in on itself; the sky was shuttered with heavy clouds that threatened rain. I seemed to bow under the pressure of that sky, and I was bent by the time I walked into court. I’d expected to be treated differently, like everyone knew, but that didn’t happen. I’d imagined the worst, a public shunning, but in the end it was just another day in court. So I sat through calendar call in near silence, addressing the court when my cases were called off the docket: one for plea, one for trial. Then I went to meet my clients in the crowded hallway.

  They were petty cases, misdemeanors; I had to glance at the files to remember what my clients were charged with. It was typical Monday bullshit, except I had one guy who I thought might be innocent. I’d take his case to trial.

  We stood in the burned tobacco smell by the outside door, a trash can for my desk. I dealt with the plea first. He was forty-three years old, overweight, and divorced. He nodded compulsively as I spoke, his lower lip loose over tobacco-stained teeth, his shirt already soaked through with sickly sweet perspiration. The “fear sweats” we called them. I saw it all the time. For most, criminal court was a foreign place, something that would never really happen. Then suddenly, it became real, and you heard your name called out in that room full of criminals, armed bailiffs, and the stiff-faced judge who sat above it all. By noon, the hall would be ripe, the courtroom even worse. There were 540 cases on the docket that day, a microcosm of greed, anger, jealousy, and lust. Just pick an emotion, and you’d find the crime to embody it. And they moved around us, an endless sea, each looking for his lawyer, his witness, or his lover. Some just looking for a smoke to kill the hours until their case was called. Many had been through the system so often, it was old hat. Others, like my guy, had the sweats.

  He’d been charge
d with assault on a female, a class-A1 misdemeanor, just shy of a felony. He lived across the street from a very attractive young woman who’d been having marital problems with her pastor husband. How had my client known this? For several months, he’d used a scanner to intercept their cordless phone calls. During this time, he’d convinced himself that the cause of their problems was her infatuation with him, an assertion that anyone with working eyes could tell was absurd. And yet he believed it. He believed it now, just as he had six weeks ago, when he’d forced his way into her trailer, pinned her against the kitchen counter, and rubbed his crotch all over her. There’d been no rape, no penetration; the clothes had stayed on. He was reticent about why he finally left. I suspected premature ejaculation.

  At our first meeting, he’d wanted to go to trial. Why? Because she’d wanted him to do what he did. He should not be punished for that. Should he? “It ain’t right, I tell you. She loves me. She wanted it,” he’d said.

  I hated the sweaters. They’d listen to you, but they always wanted to get too close, as if you could truly save them. Three weeks before, we’d met in my office, and he’d told me his side of the story. The victim’s side of it was unsurprising. She barely knew his name, found him physically repulsive, and had not slept through the night since the day it happened. I found her entirely credible. One look at her and the judge would drop the hammer on my guy. No question about it.

  Eventually, I convinced my client that a plea of simple assault would be in his best interest. It was a lesser charge, and I’d worked a deal with the DA. He’d do community service. No time.

  In the hallway, he licked his lips, and I saw dried spit at the corners of his mouth. I wanted to explain what was expected and how to address the court. All he wanted to talk about was her. What did she say about him? How did she look? What was she wearing?

  He had all the makings of a client for life. The next time, it might be worse.

  I warned him that the judge would order him to stay away from the victim, that going near her would be a violation of the terms of the plea. He didn’t get it, or if he did, he didn’t care; but I’d done my job, as disgusting as it was, and he could go back to his little hole and his dark fantasies of the preacher’s wife.

  The second client was a young black man, charged with resisting arrest. The cop said he’d hampered an arrest, that he’d incited a watching crowd by yelling at the cops to fuck off. My client had a different story. It had taken four white cops to catch the lone black man who had been arrested. When the charging officer had walked past my client, he’d been smoking a cigarette, at which point my client had said, “That’s why you can’t catch nobody, ’cause you smoking.” The cop had stopped, said, “You want to go to jail?” My client had laughed. “You can’t arrest me for that,” he’d told him.

  The cop had cuffed him and tossed him in the patrol car. And here we were.

  This client, I believed, mainly because I knew the cop. He was fat, mean, and a chain-smoker. The judge knew it, too. I thought we had a good chance at acquittal.

  The trial took less than an hour. My client walked. Sometimes reasonable doubt is easy to find. Sometimes it’s not. As I was shaking his hand, moving away from the defense table, I looked over his shoulder and saw Douglas standing in the shadowed alcove at the back of the courtroom. He never came to district court, not without reason. I lifted my hand out of habit, but his arms remained crossed over his fat man’s chest. I looked away from his hooded eyes to say good-bye to my beaming client, and when I looked back, Douglas was gone.

  Like that, the last of my delusions fell away, leaving me naked before the truths I’d denied all morning. The room tilted and sudden dampness warmed my face and palms—the fear sweats, this time from the inside. I stumbled from court on weak legs, passed other lawyers without hearing or seeing them. I plowed through packed humanity in the hall, groping my way like a blind man. I almost fell through the bathroom door, and didn’t take time to close the stall. Files slipped unheeded to the floor as my knees struck the damp, urine-stained tile. Then, in one unending clench, I vomited into the stinking toilet.

  CHAPTER 17

  Eventually, I got to my feet. I walked outside and found the wind; it gusted against my face as if to scrub it clean. Behind me, the courthouse rose up, pale against the monolithic sky. The light was silver and wan, a cold light, and people streamed past on the sidewalk below me. Normal people doing normal things, yet they seemed to bow beneath the pressure of the sky, leaning into the sidewalk as they forged uphill toward the restaurants and shops. None of them looked at the courthouse as they passed. They probably never gave it a thought, and in a way I hated them, but it was more like envy.

  My eyes traveled up the street to the faded door of the local downtown bar. I needed lunch but wanted a drink. I wanted it so badly, I could actually taste it. Standing there, fantasizing about a cold beer, I realized just how much I’d been drinking the past few years. It didn’t bother me. It was the least of my problems, a small revelation among the ugly multitude. But I decided against it. Instead, I turned for the office, moving down the broad courthouse steps.

  I stepped onto the sidewalk and turned toward lawyers’ row. I watched my feet, so it took several moments before I noticed the strange looks, but eventually I felt them. As I walked, people stopped and stared, people I knew: a couple of lawyers, a lady from the clerk’s office, two patrolmen walking to court for trial. They all stopped to watch me pass, and it felt unreal, like they were frozen in time. I saw every expression with great clarity: disbelief, curiosity, disgust. There were whispers, too, as lawyers I’d known for ten years refused to meet my eyes and spoke behind raised hands. My steps faltered and slowed as I moved through this strange scene, and for a moment I thought that I’d been mumbling to myself or that my fly was open. Yet as I turned the corner onto lawyers’ row, I saw the unbearable truth, and thus came to understand.

  The police had come to my office, descended upon it. Patrol cars strobed at my front door. Unmarked vehicles leaned drunkenly, two wheels on the sidewalk, two on the street. Officers moved in and out of my office, carrying boxes. Bystanders stood in loose groups, and I recognized almost every one of them. They were the lawyers who worked all around me. Their secretaries. Their interns and paralegals. In one instance, a wife, her hand to her throat, as if I might steal her jewelry. I froze, yet somehow I clung to my dignity. Only one lawyer met my eyes, and it was as I’d imagined it would be. Douglas was distant, massive in a long gray coat that hung on him like a sack. He stood at the door and our eyes met in silent accord. Then he shook his head, and parted the crowd to walk toward me. It took an effort of will, but I moved forward to meet him on even terms.

  He raised his hands, palms up, but I spoke first. People kept their distance and watched in silence.

  “I assume you have a search warrant,” I demanded.

  Douglas took in my appearance and I knew that he saw what he expected to see. Red-eyed, haunted. I looked guilty. When he spoke, there was no sadness in his eyes. “I’m sorry it had to come to this, Work, but you left me no choice.”

  Police officers continued in and out of my office, and, looking over Douglas’s shoulder, I saw my secretary for the first time; she looked small and beaten.

  “There’s always a choice,” I said.

  “Not this time.”

  “I’d like to see the warrant.”

  “Of course.” Douglas produced the warrant and I looked at it without seeing it. Something was wrong with this picture and I needed time to figure out what it was. When it hit me, it hit me hard.

  “Where’s Mills?” I looked around. Her car was nowhere to be seen.

  Douglas hesitated, and in that hesitation I saw the truth of it.

  “She’s at my house. Isn’t she? She’s searching my goddamn house!”

  “Now, take it easy, Work. Just settle down. Let’s do this by the book. We both know how it works.”

  I stepped closer, noticing for the firs
t time that I was taller than Douglas. “Yeah. I know how it works. You get frustrated and I get screwed. Do you think people are going to forget this?” I gestured. “Look around. There’s no going back.”

  Douglas was immovable and unmoved. He stared at my chin, so close that he could have stretched out his lips and kissed it. “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be. Okay? None of us wants to be here.”

  I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “You’re forgetting about Mills.”

  Douglas sighed, the first sign of emotion. “I told you not to piss her off. I warned you.” He hesitated, as if debating. “You shouldn’t have lied to her.”

  “What lie?” I demanded, my voice rising higher than I’d planned. “Who says I lied?”

  In shock, I saw his face shift. It seemed to soften. He took my arm and turned me away from the watching crowd. Together, we walked down the sidewalk until we were out of earshot. Seen from a distance, it would have looked like any normal day on lawyers’ row, two attorneys consulting over a case or sharing a tasteless joke. But this was no normal day.

  “I’m telling you this because it’s on the affidavit supporting the warrant, and you’d have gotten around to it eventually. We couldn’t get the warrant without probable cause. . . .”

  “Don’t lecture me on the law of search and seizure, Douglas. Just get to the point.”

  “It’s Alex Shiften, Work. She contradicts your alibi. You told Mills that on the night your mother died, you, Jean, and Ezra left the hospital and returned to Ezra’s house. You also told her that after you left Ezra’s house, you went straight home and were there all night with Barbara. Alex says that’s not true; she swears to it, in fact.”

  “True or not, how the hell would Alex know that?”

  Douglas sighed again, and I realized that this was the part that pained him. “Jean told her. Jean went to your house later that night. She wanted to talk to you, she says. She got there in time to see you leave. This would have been late, sometime after midnight. She watched you drive off and then she went home and told Alex. Alex told Mills, and here we are.” He paused and leaned in toward me. “You lied to us, Work. You left us no choice.”