Corrupt Practices (16 page)

“Most of the time she was smiling with that condescending look they all get, like they’re in the hands of a higher power and you’re not. But when she left she asked if she could stop by the shop the next week. As if she needs my permission to buy a cup of coffee. Then, when she was about to leave, her expression changed and she said, ‘Please don’t tell Parker Stern I was here.’ She’s afraid of you, Parker. Like, really terrified.”

“Why would—?”

“Just let me finish. She’s getting these harassing e-mails from someone claiming they knew Rich. She thinks you’re sending them. She also blames you for Rich’s death.”

“She thinks I murdered Rich? You’re not serious.”

“No, she thinks . . . I don’t know what she thinks. Something about your getting him in over his head. I told her she was full of shit. The weird thing is, she keeps coming back. Every Thursday at three. Like she wants to hang out with me all of a sudden, which doesn’t make sense given the way the Assembly views gays and lesbians. But I think things have been different for her since Rich died. I think she’s been ostracized because of how the Assembly feels about suicide. You know, the way some people used to feel about HIV, still do, shunning not only the victim, but the victim’s family? So she comes in and nurses her cup of coffee and I keep her company. Like I said, I doubt she’ll talk to you, but if you want to come around Thursday at three . . .”

So I canceled today’s law school class and now sit hiding in a dark corner of The Barrista, lying in wait like an alley thug and hoping that when Monica sees me, she won’t spit in my face.

She walks into the shop at precisely three o’clock, pushing a stroller. Rich told me the child’s name—Josh. Two years old, now. The next few minutes play out like a silent movie. She orders coffee and a scone and a cup of milk, finds a table, and lifts the wriggling child into an industrial highchair. She fills a yellow plastic cup with the milk and hands it to him. He shakes it a bit, then drinks, dribbling milk on his chin. After wiping his mouth, she tears off a piece of the scone and feeds it to him—a surprise, because the Assembly’s dietary guidelines forbid the consumption of refined sugar, especially for young children. Deanna walks over to the table and sits down. The women chat for a while, Deanna smiling often and Monica mostly stone-faced, smiling only when attending to her son. At one point, she reaches into her bag and hands him a velvet-green stuffed turtle, which the boy takes with obvious delight. Deanna talks to the toddler and makes him smile. She leans forward and places her hand on Monica’s wrist, whispering something. Monica purses her lips in a tight frown and scans the coffee shop. When she sees me, her face darkens with a mixture of anger and fear. She tries to stand, but Deanna keeps a hand on her wrist. From where I sit, it looks like Deanna is physically restraining her.

Back at the law firm, Deanna pled her cases like an evangelist. Now, she’s talking nonstop. Monica keeps shaking her head and glancing over at me and turning away and half-standing, only to sit down again when Deanna leans in closer and says, I can’t imagine what.

Deanna releases Monica’s wrist and gestures for me to come over. I stand up, walk across the room on wobbly legs, and sit opposite Monica. She won’t meet my eyes. She’s still attractive, but the muscles of her face and neck are taut. She has uneven circles under her eyes from crying or lack of sleep or grief.

The child, well-behaved for a two-year-old, seems engrossed in his toy turtle. He looks like his father—blond hair, green eyes, pudgy cheeks, and a ruddy complexion. Deanna stands up and takes the boy out of the highchair.

“Come on, Joshy,” she says. “Let’s go see where we make all the coffee and hot chocolate. And where we keep the cookies.”

“Mommy, no!”

“Mommy will be right here, sweetie,” Monica says, her voice quavering. “Deanna won’t take you far.” She points to the pastry counter. “Right over there. Mommy will be sitting right here, and you’ll be able to see me all the time. And Deanna will give you one cookie. But only one.”

This pacifies him. Deanna takes him over to the counter. He keeps looking our way to make sure his mother is still there. Why shouldn’t he fear letting her out of his sight? His father left one day and never came back. But maybe all two-year-olds act this way. How would I know?

“It’s been a long time,” I say. “I’m so sorry about Rich.”

Her cheeks are flushed. “They say you and his father just want Rich’s money. I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

“Why are you, then?”

“Because of what Deanna said. She told me you found something in the autopsy report that shows that someone . . . that Rich didn’t kill himself. If that’s true, Joshy and I . . .” Her voice trails off, but I now understand why she agreed to speak with me. If Rich didn’t commit suicide, then under Assembly dogma, he wasn’t diseased after all, and neither she nor her son could be contaminated with the same illness. She’s hoping I can offer absolution.

“Did you send those horrible e-mails?” she asks.

“Absolutely not.”

“Then Rich’s father.”

I shake my head. “I realize that you don’t know him very well, but there’s no way.”

“I don’t know him at all. I only know that he hates me.”

Each time I try to make the slightest eye contact, she looks away. I see no sign of the Monica I expected—the calculating femme fatale, no better than a temple prostitute who lured an innocent like Rich Baxter into a nefarious cult. This person just seems frightened and grief-stricken.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” I say.

“Of course you would. You’re a lawyer.”

“What do the e-mails say?”

“They’re so scary. Written by a defective. They say that the person who stole the Assembly’s money also killed Rich. And Harmon Cherry. They say that Joshy’s life and mine are in danger. That I should go to the police; that I should hide; that whatever I do there’s no escape. That I shouldn’t trust the Assembly elders. That I shouldn’t trust anyone. That the Assembly’s involved in a worldwide conspiracy . . . and on and on and on.”

“Whatever would make you think I sent those?”

She finally looks me in the eye, and I feel as if she’s slapped my face. “Because you have contempt for our beliefs. Because you dislike me, even though you don’t know anything about me. Because you got involved in this with Rich, and I don’t understand why.”

Now I’m the one who looks away.

Her words come quickly now. “Because Rich said he was working with an outsider. He wouldn’t say who it was. It was too dangerous for him to tell, he said. But when he hired you as his attorney I figured it must be you. It was you, right? You’re the one who got him into that stupid investigation about embezzlement and Harmon Cherry, the reason he got arrested, and then . . .” Her eyes fill with tears, and I think she’s going cry, but instead she smiles broadly, an act so eerie that I feel as if an icy finger is tracing curlicues down my spine. Then I realize that she’s forcing the smile for Josh, who’s waving to her. She waves back.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “The first time I spoke with Rich was when I met with him at the jail. What did Rich tell you about this . . . this outsider?”

“He discovered financial irregularities and he needed help in analyzing them. That kind of work wasn’t his strength. I offered to help—I worked in accounting, you know—but he said it was too risky, that he had to keep me out of it. I wanted him to go to Chris McCarthy, but he said he had to work with someone outside the Assembly, because he thought the embezzler was inside. I didn’t believe him, but he insisted. That’s when he rented the place in Silver Lake, because he said what he was doing was dangerous, that he couldn’t have an outsider coming to our house. He was always talking about how good a lawyer you were, so I assumed . . .”

“You knew about the Silver Lake apartment?”

“I knew he had a safe house. I didn’t know where until after.”

“Do you know that . . . that the FBI and the building landlord say . . . you must know that they say he was bringing women there. And that he was found with drugs.”

“You’re rude to bring up those lies.”

“If I’m going to get to the truth, I can’t sugarcoat my questions.”

She shakes her head so hard that her straight brown hair swishes back and forth across her shoulders. “Rich wouldn’t go with prostitutes. He was always faithful to me. And he wouldn’t take drugs. The Assembly forbids drug use, and so he wouldn’t. He’s—he was—a good husband and a devoted father. He was using the apartment to meet with the outsider and investigate the financial irregularities.”

I’ve always assumed that on her side, the marriage was one of expediency, not love, and that the Assembly arranged the marriage. Did I have it wrong? Or did she learn to love him? Whatever the truth, I’m not going to try to convince her that her husband consorted with whores.

“Where did the drugs come from? And the false passport?”

“They must’ve been planted. Maybe he thought that the murderer . . . I don’t know. But there has to be an explanation.” Now she sounds just like her estranged father-in-law.

I pose a few follow-up questions, but she can’t tell me anything more. When I ask to see the anonymous e-mails, she balks. I’m sure that Christopher McCarthy or one of his subordinates instructed her to have nothing to do with me. But after some prodding, she agrees to leave copies of the e-mails with Deanna.

“I have to get my son home,” she says. “I really shouldn’t have talked to you. Just know that nobody from my church would harm Rich. We’re devoted to peace and curing the defects in man that lead to war and violence and disease and unhappiness.” Monica nods at Deanna, who walks Josh back over.

“He’s such a good boy,” Deanna says.

“He’s a wonderful boy,” Monica says, straightening his clothing. “So are all the children of the Fount.” She places him in the stroller.

“There’s something else I have to ask you,” I say. “It’d be helpful to know everyone Rich was close to. Friends. People who worked with him. Secretaries, staff, anyone.”

“Now you’re trying to intrude on the lives of others?”

“No. I’m just trying to find witnesses who—”

“Everyone you call a
witness
is devoted to the Assembly. All our friends, all of the people who worked with Rich—who mainly work for Chris McCarthy, too, by the way. No one will talk to you. If you try to contact them, Josh and I will be the ones who suffer.”

“If there were even a couple of them who might—”

She shuts her eyes in frustration. “I knew this was a mistake.”

“You didn’t make a mistake. I won’t cause trouble for you. I promise you that.”

She says a terse goodbye and leaves.

As soon as Monica’s out the door, Deanna sits down across from me.

“So you promised I could bring her redemption, huh?” I say. My tone is sarcastic, but the truth is, I have become responsible for the future of her and her child.

“All I can say is that it’s a good thing the kid was here. She would’ve bolted if she’d been alone. What did she tell you?”

“She told me that he was using the apartment as some kind of office and working with someone she calls an ‘outsider’. She thought it was me. That’s why she blamed me for his death. She insists that he would never sleep with prostitutes, didn’t take drugs, that there must be some mistake with the phony passport. Is she really that gullible? I mean, I saw the pictures of those women, and there’s no doubt that . . .” I sit back in my chair. Harmon used to say that assumptions are the archenemies of truth. He was right.

Although it’s been a warm day, an ocean fog rolls in as soon as the sun goes down. Water droplets hover in midair, glimmer under the stadium-style lamps that illuminate the law school campus. Dressed only in a T-shirt and jeans, I jog across the plaza, not sure whether I’m shivering from the cold or in anticipation of discovering something that will crack the Baxter case open. I fling open the door to my classroom, expecting only Jonathan Borzo. Kathleen and Lovely are there with him.

Lovely is wearing date clothes—a candy-apple red blouse over a shiny black dress that falls to mid-thigh, and sexy tan peep-toe heels that accentuate her creamy-smooth legs.
She’ll get a chill dressed like that
, I think. Unless she’s wrapped in the arms of some powerful partner from her law firm, or a hunky fellow law student, or Deanna, who announced as I was walking out of The Barrista that she was leaving early even though she never leaves early.

“Did you tell them why we’re here?” I ask Jonathan.

He grins slyly and strokes his sparse goatee like a cheesy cartoon character. He seems to enjoy riddles.

“We’re going to take another look at the photographs of the women who visited Rich Baxter’s apartment,” I say.

Lovely sighs in disappointment. We’ve already spent hours examining those photos, blowing them up, shrinking them to thumbnails, sharpening them, cropping them.

“We’ve gotten some professional help,” I say.

“Professor Stern asked me to contact my copyright client,” Jonathan says. “You know, Dmitri, the dude who hacks video games. To see if he could do a better job enhancing the photos of Baxter’s hookers. Dmitri e-mailed me some stuff.”