Falls the Shadow (27 page)

I was in my car, driving and stewing, accompanied by the raging of my anger. I had been lied to, I had been used and abused, I had been manipulated like a monkey. It had all been a fabrication, the whole violent affair between a dead woman and a mysterious motorcycle maniac named Clem, a figment of one person’s twisted imagination.

And I had bought it.

That’s what got to me the worst, not that I had been lied to—I’m a lawyer, everybody lies to me; lying to the lawyers is the true national pastime, as American as baseball and cheating on your wife—but that I hadn’t sussed out the lie. And it’s not like there weren’t enough clues. The overly dramatic visits to the grave site by Velma Takahashi. The way I forced the story of Clem out of that bastard Sonenshein with my way-too-clever threat of Japanese gangsters. The manner of Velma Takahashi, going through the motions during our confrontation about the mystery man. And what had she said of him?
He is nothing. He’s nowhere. He’s a phantom.

Sometimes I almost think I’m clever, and then reality spits a glob of humiliation in my face.

I realized it all while staring at Jerry Sonenshein on the witness stand. And still I thought of going after him, of showing him to be a liar and continuing with the Clem defense. The believable lie is often the best approach in court. Where would lawyers be if all we had to work with was the truth? But the strange image that kept coming back to me, the image of the flower in the vase, convinced me otherwise. Even one question to that bastard would have been one question too many. So I declined our cross-examination. And as the spectators let out a collective gasp, I stormed out of the courtroom without another word, leaving it for Beth to clean up the mess.

And now I was in my car, driving and stewing. Stewing and driving. But I wasn’t just driving hither and thither, without a plan. I knew where I was headed. It was a Thursday afternoon, and I was going to the manicurist.

The joint was posh, with a long maroon awning fronting the entrance, with blue and gray velvet curtains and fresh flowers artfully arranged in the waiting room, with a marble floor and a woman sitting behind the appointment desk so pale and so cold she might as well have been made of porcelain. Her face cracked a little when she saw me charge through the front door.

“Helloo,” she said. “Do we have an appointment?”

“No,” I said as I moved right past her. “We don’t.”

“Sir, you have to—”

“I can’t wait,” I said, showing her the back of my hand, wiggling my fingers. “It’s a cuticle emergency.”

She recoiled in horror at the sight of my nails, which gave me enough time to slip through the doorway and into the salon proper. There were a series of workstations on either side of a hallway, each curtained off for privacy. I moved through the salon with an abiding sense of purpose, flicking open the curtains to check who was being worked on, eliciting a series of shrieks as I made my way toward the rear. And then I found her, swathed in a thick white robe, a towel around her head, leaning back in a lounge chair, being fussed over, literally, hand and foot.

“Why did you do it?” I said.

“Have you come for a pedicure, Victor?” said Velma Takahashi as the two slim woman working on her nails turned their faces toward me. “Minh here has such a deft touch. It is so relaxing.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Do what? Choose this color polish? I thought it matched my eyes. You don’t think it matches my eyes?”

Just then the receptionist came up from behind me, holding a nail file like a knife. “I tried to stop him, Mrs. Takahashi,” she said.

Seeing the situation, one of the seated women grabbed a pair of scissors and held it high, as if she were about to stab me in the kneecap.

“It’s okay, dears,” said Velma to the women. “He works for me, though I do think after this I’m going to have to let him go.” The receptionist retreated, the manicurists went back to work.

“Why did you set up François?” I said, still standing before her as the women filed and painted and buffed.

“I would never set up François.”

“But it sure seems like it. I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I can’t. Do you hate him so much you were you trying to torture him further, providing him false hope and then manipulating his defense attorney into relying on a premise so easily shown to be false?”

“Tell me what happened, Victor.”

“Your buddy Sunshine spilled it all to the D.A. The way you convinced him to tell his cock-and-bull story about Clem and Leesa, the way he duped me into believing it.”

Her mouth twitched and then regained its normal artificial poutiness. “He’s a pathetic liar.”

“Yes, he is,” I said. “But this time he’s telling the truth. And now François is screwed, and I’ve been played for the fool.”

“Your natural position. I guess you won’t anymore be needing me to testify.”

“Why, Velma? That’s what I want to know.”

“Have you ever regretted anything in your life, Victor?”

“Only everything.”

“So you know the way it seeps through your bones like an acid. Drip, drip, drip.”

“But what is it you regret? A life wasted in the pursuit of someone else’s money?”

“Is that a waste?”

“The series of surgeries that turned you into a Kewpie doll?”

“I thought you liked the result.”

“Or do you regret killing Leesa Dubé?”

“Oh, Victor, you’ve come unhinged.”

“Have I? You say you didn’t try to set up François, so maybe you were actually trying to help him and botched it. But then the question is why? Why help that slimy son of a bitch? The answer might be in the visits to the grave site, the guilt in your eyes. Why would you concoct this lie except to make some amends? Did you kill her, Velma?”

“Why would I kill my best friend?”

“Maybe she knew more than she should have. Maybe she knew enough to prove adultery to your husband and ruin your marriage, not to mention your bank account. All those years with Takahashi wasted if he could enforce the adultery provisions of the prenup. So Leesa had to go, and to keep attention away from you, you framed the husband. You sneaked into his apartment after the deed, dropped the gun in his shirt, smeared some blood on his boot. A perfect frame.”

“You’re being silly.”

“Am I? Or am I so dead-on it’s scary?”

“It’s scary, all right. The thing is, Victor, your motive is empty. I’ve never cheated on my husband.”

“I’m supposed to believe that?”

“No, of course not. Why would you? It’s only the truth.” She pulled her hands away from the manicurist. “I’m sorry, but I have to go. I have a meeting.”

“To figure out another lie to tell?”

“One mustn’t become bitter, Victor. Life is full of wonderful surprises, so long as you aren’t looking too hard for them. Like love, when you thought you were incapable. I still have some time here. Why don’t you take over the rest of my appointment? Your hands could use some work, and I don’t even want to imagine your feet.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“No, really, Victor. Take advantage.” She lifted her feet off the pads, slipped them into a set of slippers, stood up from the chair, waved her hands in the air in an effort to dry the polish. “Minh is the best in the city.”

“I’ll pass.”

“You don’t think much of me, do you, Victor?”

“No, actually.”

“Well, I might agree with you. But quick, choose: love or money?”

“Both.”

“And so you have neither. I wasn’t satisfied with that option.”

“I don’t see you going for the daily double,” I said.

“You’re not looking hard enough.” Velma pursed her lips at me as if to air-kiss. “We’re all just trying to get by, Victor. Doing the best to get what we want. Is that so bad?”

“When someone else pays the price.”

“Oh, Victor. Someone is always paying the price. Win a case, and someone else loses. Marry a man, and someone else is heartbroken. Become a saint, and someone else’s beatification is delayed. I didn’t invent the world, I’m just a little girl doing my best.”

And then she was off, out of the curtained cubicle down toward the dressing room, leaving me alone with the two manicurists. I was about to run after her, but what was the point? So I just stood there for a moment and tried to gather my thoughts.

Then one of the women motioned me to the chair.

I shook my head, but she took hold of the fabric of my suit and gently tugged. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in the chair as Minh slowly untied my shoe.

I was strangely serene when I returned to the office that afternoon. And for some reason I had the bizarre notion to go out and buy a pair of sandals. But Beth, waiting for me in the conference room, wasn’t so calm.

“Are you trying to sabotage this case?” she said. “Because from what I saw today, it looks like you are tossing our client to the wolves.”

“It was all a lie,” I said as I pulled out a chair and sat down. In front of me on the conference table was the photograph of Leesa Dubé, taken before her murder. She was pretty, she was smiling, she was alive. I had stared at that photograph enough over the last few weeks that it had become oddly familiar, like an old friend. And still, after all this, I didn’t know what had really happened to her. All I knew now was that the killer of this lovely woman wasn’t some motorcycle maniac. “The whole story about Clem and Leesa was a lie.”

“How do you know? Maybe Sunshine is lying now. Maybe to get his little deal, he took the stand and said just what Mia Dalton wanted him to say.”

“She wouldn’t put on a lie.”

“But she put on a liar, because if Sunshine was telling the truth today, then he lied to us.”

“Yes, he did.”

“So you didn’t think it was valuable to point that out to the jury?”

“Dalton already did that for us. We can argue it at closing.”

“Oh, that will be effective. Why don’t we save time and let her put on our entire case? Tell me truthfully, Victor. Is this some misguided attempt to save the poor damsel in distress?”

“Is that what you are?”

“You’re no white knight, and I don’t need your help.”

“Beth—”

“Or are you just jealous? Is that it?”

“Maybe I am, a little.”

“You’re a bastard.”

“But that’s not why I did what I did.”

“So then tell me why, Victor, because I don’t understand. How can you be so sure which was the lie and which was the truth? And if you are certain, why didn’t you cross-examine the lying bastard anyway? Any first-year law student could have destroyed Sunshine’s credibility up there. Afterward, we could still have put Velma on the stand to tell her story about Clem. It would have been a she-said-versus-he-said, and he would be a proven liar. It would have been reasonable doubt.”

“It would have been a disaster,” I said.

“What makes you so certain we couldn’t pull it off?”

“Because there’s a tape.”

“A tape?”

“Of Velma asking him to lie, a tape in which she details the story she wants him to tell and he agrees to tell it.”

“Oh,” she said. “A tape.”

“Yeah.”

“Extrinsic evidence of a prior consistent statement.”

“Right.”

“That wouldn’t have been so good, would it?”

“No.”

“Then maybe I was a little out of line.”

“Just a touch.”

Beth might have been angry and confused, but she was always a terrific lawyer and saw the issue right away. If there was indeed a tape of Velma convincing Sonenshein to lie, the rules of evidence prohibited Mia Dalton from playing it during her direct examination. But if in my cross-examination I tried to show that Sonenshein was lying on the stand, suddenly Dalton could play the tape to disprove my point. It’s a bit complicated and legalistic, but suffice it to say that Dalton expected that I would attack her witness, opening the door for her to play the tape for the jury. It was a trap I had barely slipped out of.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Sure enough. It was in the way Sonenshein sat on the stand, smugly confident. It was in the way Dalton stared at me, almost like she was hoping I wouldn’t fall for it. And because it was little Jerry Sonenshein, the AV geek up there. Remember how the bartender at his club said that he was always taping the help, to see if they were stealing? Real James Bond stuff, he said. And remember how wherever we ran into him there was a little flower in a vase that he was always fiddling with, both in the cigar lounge and in his downstairs office? He was taping us, and if he was taping us, he was taping her.”

“That means we can’t use Velma either.”

“Right.” Because Dalton would simply play the tape to refute her story.

“So now we have nothing. We’re in the middle of a murder trial without a strategy, without a theory, without a suspect.”

“But we’ve got each other.”

“Oh, God,” she said as she put a hand over her face. “It’s hopeless.” And then, with her hand still over her face, she began to cry. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t maudlin, it was mostly just a few shakes of her shoulders, but it was enough to tear at my heart. I looked again at the picture of Leesa Dubé, who had once loved François, and then at the woman with apparently the same affliction, crying a few feet away. It was a plague.

“Tell me about your father,” I said quietly.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, shook her head as if she were shaking a rattle, squinted at me. “What?”

“I asked about your father.”

“I heard you,” she said, giving a quick rub to her nose. “What does he have to do with anything? He lives in Cherry Hill, he’s getting a hip transplant, he plays golf.”

“Really?”

“I guess it’s more like he plays at golf. But you’ve met him. He’s been to the office.”

“That’s right. Of course.”

“So?”

“Is he your real father?”

“Victor?”

“I’m just curious.”

“He’s been the only father I’ve ever known. He married my mother when I was six.”

“So he’s your stepfather. What happened to your real father?”

“He died. Victor?”

“How?”

“He just did. Victor, stop.”

“You never told me what happened to your real father.”

“That’s right, I never did.”

“Do you want to now?”

“No, I don’t. Victor, what are we going to do about François?”

“I don’t know.” I picked up the photograph of Leesa Dubé, showed it to Beth. “She looks awfully familiar, doesn’t she?”

“A woman that pretty, I don’t think you’d forget.”

“No, I don’t think I would.”

“And I must admit she had marvelous teeth. All right, I’m going to go talk to our client before they ship him out for the night.”

“Okay.”

“Are you going to come up with something? Anything?”

“I hope so,” I said, though what I really meant was,
I doubt it.

She stood up wearily, made to leave the room, and then stopped. “By the way,” she said, “someone mailed back that key you lost.”

“I didn’t lose a key.”

“You must have. It came for you, in an envelope, with no note.” She pointed to a manila envelope addressed to me, with no postage and no return address.

“Hand-delivered?” I said.

She shrugged.

I emptied the envelope into my hand. A single bronze key with the number 27 stamped on it and the word
E
-
ZEE
.

“It’s not mine,” I said. “It must be a mistake.”

“Then toss it,” she said before leaving the room.

I turned the key over in my hand, back and forth, trying to figure what it might be, and failing. The hell with it, I thought as I slipped it into my pocket. I had other things to concern me just then.

I had felt a strange hope for a moment, a hope that I’d been wrong when I imagined the little girl in the back of the Pontiac to be Beth. Yes, I knew her father, a charming man with a slight limp and a penchant for bad jokes. No, Beth was not the type to be haunted by her past. And yes, she would have told me the truth of it long before. We were best friends. There were no secrets between us. But of course I had secrets I’d never told her. And, it appeared, she had secrets of her own.

So it was just as I had imagined. I had mentioned my concerns about Beth to Whitney Robinson. Whit must have told Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob must have burrowed like a mole into Beth’s past to see what he could find. And then, in my next appointment, Dr. Bob had maneuvered his one-sided conversation to spill the horrific events of that past to me. The whole chain of events made me feel like I had fallen into a pit of sludge.

What a strange man he was, Dr. Bob. Dentist to François’s first defense attorney. Dentist to the troubled boy who testified to seeing François at the crime scene. Dentist now to François’s second defense attorney. He seemed in the middle of everything. Well, almost everything.

I picked up the picture of Leesa Dubé. Turned it one way, turned it the other. What was it Beth had said?
And I must admit she had marvelous teeth.
And they were, weren’t they? Like a pretentious movie director, I used my fingers to frame the photograph so that only her smile was visible.

Holy molars, Batman.

Now I knew why the picture seemed so familiar. I had seen that smile before, every time I stepped into Dr. Bob’s office. It was on the wall, part of the smile hall of fame. Dr. Bob was Leesa Dubé’s dentist, too. Did that explain anything? Who the hell knew? But I was going to find out.

I picked up the phone, placed a call to his office, got the great man himself on the phone.

“Hey, Doc,” I said, “you want to go out for a beer?”