Fox is Framed (13 page)

Shanahan repeated the testimony he'd given at the prelim about his conversation with Russell Bell in which Bell had related Lawrence's alleged confession behind bars, concluding with my father's alleged statement about his only regret being that I was the one who'd found her body.

“Did Maxwell say why his younger son hadn't been to visit him in all those years?”

“It was obvious. His father had murdered his mother and the kid knew it. He'd found the body.”

As if from far away, I heard Nina's objection. But my eyes were on Shanahan, who'd turned his own gaze on me as he made this statement. I felt the jurors' eyes follow his.

Angela Crowder chose this moment to introduce the 911 call I'd made, and before I knew what was happening she was playing it. The child's voice that had once been mine filled the courtroom.
It's my mom
, the small voice said.
She's hurt.

The light in the courtroom seemed to change. It was as if an actor had stepped off the stage and taken my hand against my will.

After the recording, Crowder went through the confession a few more times, fleshing out all the details, getting Shanahan to repeat the crucial parts, asking questions the only point of which was to burn Bell's words into the jurors' brains, emphasizing the past tense just enough to beg the question of where Russell was and why he wasn't here to testify in person.

Shanahan's testimony was simple, to the point, and devastatingly effective in establishing my father's guilt. Sooner than I expected, Crowder's examination was finished.

We broke for lunch, and then it was Nina's turn.

Chapter 16

She stood at the podium, her hair swept back and held in a tight knot with a comb, the light finding the tender place at the side of her jaw. I was almost as aware of the jurors looking at her as I'd been of them looking at me, and I felt a stirring of pride at the relaxed set of her shoulders, the way she stared Shanahan in the eye as if he were a captive animal and she knew how to handle him.

“You just testified about a set of pictures filed as newly discovered evidence. Who took them?”

“My understanding is that they were taken by a private investigator hired by the wife of the man Caroline Maxwell had been having her affair with, but I don't know that for certain. They were discovered by Teddy Maxwell, the defendant's oldest son. I understand that he received them from a family member,” Shanahan said, repeating the testimony he'd just given.

“The doctor's wife was angry at him for having an affair with Caroline Maxwell. Would that be fair to say?”

“I think that would be fair. The doctor told me that he'd wanted to call it off, but he couldn't bring himself to end it.”

“So even after his wife discovered the affair and confronted him with the photographic proof, this man went on seeing Caroline?”

“In my understanding.”

“Did the doctor's wife know that he was doing this?”

“I can't say what she knew or didn't know,” he said.

“Did you ask the doctor's wife that question?”

“I haven't spoken with her,” Shanahan replied.

“So you made no attempt to interview this woman to determine whether she harbored feelings of jealousy and rage toward Caroline Maxwell for intruding on her marriage?”

“I felt that I'd already intruded on the family enough.”

“And to be clear, you never considered the possibility that this woman, motivated by jealousy, murdered her husband's lover, did you?”

Shanahan blinked. “No, I never considered it. She couldn't have left—”

“Couldn't have left the semen in her body. That's what you were about to say.”

Shanahan didn't answer.

“That's what you were about to say, isn't it, Detective?”

“Yes,” he admitted. Watching from the gallery, I was elated at his unforced error and her deftness in catching it. Maybe the jurors had seen
Presumed Innocent
, or read the book.

Nina stepped back from the podium and turned to the jurors, driving home her point. “But Mr. Maxwell couldn't have left that semen, either. We know from the lab reports, the ones that were withheld from the defense years ago by Gary Coles, that the semen in Caroline Maxwell's body didn't match his blood type.”

“That's right. She probably had multiple lovers.”

Nina circled to establish that this was pure speculation, then said, “You've just testified that your belief is that Mr. Maxwell was motivated by jealousy to murder his wife. Wouldn't the wife of the man whom Caroline Maxwell was sleeping with have had a similar motivation?”

“Possibly. But that doesn't mean she acted on it like he did.”

“How about this other man or men she was supposedly sleeping with? Couldn't he have killed her?”

“The circumstantial evidence pointed to the defendant.”

“But not the
physical
evidence,” Nina said. “Or at least Gary Coles didn't think so.”

Crowder objected and Nina moved on, next getting him to admit that there was no evidence that my father had known Caroline was having an affair, that unlike the doctor's wife, Lawrence hadn't hired a private investigator. This was just warmup for the main attack, I knew. We didn't intend to argue that the jilted wife was the killer. The point was that Shanahan hadn't bothered to eliminate her as a suspect. “The man confessed,” he finally said. “That's good enough for me.”

Now Nina turned to the real focus of our defense. I rested my elbows on my knees, inwardly urging her on. She briskly established the facts of Keith Locke's attempted murder of my brother, his guilty plea and subsequent imprisonment, and that this crime came as the culmination of a long criminal career. “And despite this extensive criminal history, including sex offenses, you never considered Keith Locke a suspect in Caroline Maxwell's death.”

“No, I didn't.”

“Instead you focused your energies on trying to find a snitch.”

Shanahan was growing frustrated. “It seemed logical to me that in all those years, Maxwell might have confessed.”

“Do you even know if Keith Locke's blood type matches the semen that was left in Caroline Maxwell's body, according to the report we have?”

Shanahan admitted that he hadn't looked into whether the blood types matched. I allowed myself a fist pump behind the back of the bench in front of me, where the jurors couldn't see it. My face was as impassive as a choirboy's.

“It wouldn't be difficult to check, right? All you'd have to do is get his Department of Corrections medical file. In fact, I have it right here.” She'd walked to the defense table and picked up a folder. Now she approached the witness stand. “Do you want to look at it, Detective, and see if Keith Locke's blood type is consistent with him being the person who left that semen in Mrs. Maxwell?”

“Do I
want
to?”

“You don't really want to do that, do you?” She picked up one of the DA's exhibits from the clerk's table. “Here's the old lab report that Gary Coles didn't want the defense to see. Here's Keith Locke's medical file. I've got the page marked for you. Just turn to the red flag. Don't you want to look, Detective, just to check?”

At the witness stand, the man's body language betrayed his deep reluctance and loathing. “Sure, I'll take a look.”

Nina offered the medical file as an exhibit, handed a copy to Crowder, gave another to the clerk to be marked, and passed a third to Judge Liu. She retrieved the marked copy and handed it to Shanahan. “Turn to the tabbed page, if you will. What can you tell us?” She turned to the jury. “Do we have a match?”

He glanced at the exhibit, then set it aside. “All this shows is that Keith Locke's blood type is the same blood type as the person who left the semen. But that doesn't prove anything. A sixth of the world has the same blood type.”

“So you're telling me it's just a coincidence?”

“Sure. You pull up enough possible suspects, sooner or later you're going to get a match.”

“And we've got one here, don't we, Detective?”

“Sure we do,” he said. “Doesn't mean anything. It's not DNA.”

“No, the DNA evidence was lost by the police, wasn't it, Detective? But if we had that DNA evidence, we could tell to a certainty whether there really was a match, correct?”

“It would prove that there wasn't, yes.”

She came at him and made him admit that he couldn't know whether the DNA matched or not, driving home her point that Shanahan's mind was closed to any possibility other than my father being the guilty one. Then she said, “Today in this courtroom is the first time you became aware that Keith Locke could have been the donor of the sperm found in Caroline Maxwell's body, correct?”

“Like I said, anyone with the same blood type could have been.”

“Exactly. Anyone other than Lawrence Maxwell, because we know his blood type didn't match, right?”

“Yes,” Shanahan admitted.

Nina next established that the SFPD had done no investigation into whether Keith Locke might have had an alibi for the murder, that Shanahan had made no attempt to account for his whereabouts at the time of the murder twenty-one years ago. “The reason you didn't ask the doctor any questions about his son is that you already believed Lawrence Maxwell was guilty, correct?”

“Let me put it this way. He was my primary suspect. I was trying to keep an open mind. But at that point, and especially after what I'd already learned in that conversation with the doctor, I felt that Maxwell had committed this crime.”

“Because in your mind, Russell Bell's story about Mr. Maxwell confessing is all that counts.”

“I found Bell very credible. And he was genuinely terrified. He told me about a number of attacks that he believed Mr. Maxwell had orchestrated behind bars, one of them resulting in a death. Bell believed he was risking his life talking to me. The fact that he was taking that risk told me that he was telling the truth.”

“Objection, our stipulation,” Nina was saying as Shanahan spoke over her.

“Sustained.” Liu addressed the jury. “The jury is to disregard the witness's last answer.”

In the gallery I felt murderous myself, my anger multiplied by my powerlessness. I shared a glance with Dot. Shanahan had clearly decided to throw aside the rules and fight dirty, stinging Nina whenever he had the chance.

“And if Bell is lying, your whole case falls apart, doesn't it, Detective?”

He wouldn't go that far, but she'd made her point. Nina sparred with him for a few more questions, then tightened the leash and ran quickly through Shanahan's first contact with Russell Bell, frequently referencing the transcript of the preliminary hearing. She established that Bell had approached Shanahan rather than the other way around. She made the detective admit that Bell had failed to divulge key facts, including that Lawrence had drafted the habeas brief that had earned Bell his release from prison. She also had Shanahan admit that Bell had given him no information that had not already been publicized about the murder itself.

Finally Nina asked, “Does Russell Bell have a source of income?”

Payback
, I thought. At her use of the present tense, Shanahan's mouth gave an angry twitch. “Not at present.”

Nina simply waited. Finally Shanahan said, “When I talked to him he was working as a driver for City Supervisor Eric Gainer.”

“Did you do anything to determine whether Russell Bell might have had a motive to get Lawrence Maxwell off the street and back in prison?”

“If he did, he never told me about it.”

“Did you ask Bell if he'd talked to Maxwell since his release?”

Shanahan hadn't asked that question.

“Why not, Detective? If there was some recent conflict between them, wouldn't that be important information for evaluating the truthfulness of Bell's story?”

“Why don't you ask Bell yourself?” Shanahan said, biting back. “I'm sure he'd be happy to fill you in.”

“That's enough,” Liu told him. “Counsel, are you finished with this witness?”

Nina consulted her notes. “For now, but I may wish to recall him.”

“The witness is excused,” Liu said. “We'll adjourn until nine
am
.”

Chapter 17

We had pizza in the conference room at Nina's office, Lawrence studying the newspaper, me going through my notes. Teddy had gone home, but Lawrence had hung around, even though I kept urging him to leave. He was nervous about his testimony tomorrow and wanted to practice his direct examination one more time, but I rebuffed him. “Go home to Dot, have a beer, and go to bed,” I said. “It's time to let tomorrow take care of itself.”

He seemed to accept this, but first asked if he could borrow my laptop. He wanted to see if a story recapping today's events was posted on the
Chronicle
's website yet. I gave it to him. He clicked a few times, then studied the screen, remaining motionless. At last he looked up. “I thought we'd agreed to trust each other.”

“I thought so, too.” I met his gaze.

“Then why am I, just now, learning about this?” He turned the laptop around to show me what he'd been staring at. It was the
Chronicle
site. Prominently displayed there was a copy of the picture I'd found online, the one with Eric and the two girls. “Teddy told me that you'd found something. I've been trying to be patient, trying not to second-guess. I figured that you must have wanted to do your homework before you talked with me about it. But don't I at least have a right to be consulted before you decide to leak something like this?”

“We didn't leak it.” I was as shocked as he was. “We wouldn't have.”

I clicked on the story that accompanied the picture. The text stated that the paper had obtained, from an anonymous source, the photo and the e-mail it had been attached to, sent to Eric Gainer's official account. It was the same one he'd showed me:
You've been a very bad boy, Eric, and I know all about it. Now will you follow my instructions? Keep ignoring me, and you'll get what Russell got.

The source evidently hadn't given the reporter any information to go with them. The article could only point out the obvious: that someone appeared to have been blackmailing Eric Gainer after Bell's death. The identities of the girls in the photograph were unknown, as were their whereabouts.

“Crowder leaked it?” Lawrence asked when I'd finished reading.

“Maybe. Then tomorrow she can come into court, pretend to be shocked.” But I had a better guess about who'd done the leaking. It'd been the same person who'd put the picture online, no doubt. The girl who'd taken me to the house on the coast—Lucy's friend.

If the DA could show that the person who'd sent the e-mail was my father, we were in trouble. In the absence of such proof, however, the leak of these documents only muddied the water, and possibly worked to our benefit, since it gave us the opportunity to portray Eric Gainer as a man with a hidden motive for employing Russell Bell. If the e-mail was genuine, it strongly suggested that the person who'd sent it had been the one who'd killed Bell.

I went across the hall to Nina's office. “I just saw it,” she said, scrolling down the website on her desktop. She was furious, convinced Crowder had been the one to leak the photo. “It won't get them anywhere,” she assured me. “They can't lay a foundation to introduce the e-mail or the photo into evidence. They can't show that it has anything to do with your father. Still, we need to be prepared to deal with it, in the unlikely event Judge Liu lets it in.”

My father had followed me and stood in the doorway. With a glance at him, I reminded her I'd put copies of that picture all over town with my name and number on them. “We've got to be careful,” I told Nina. “Because where would I get the picture other than from him?”

“Where
did
you get it?” Lawrence asked.

I told them about Eric Gainer's showing me the e-mail and blaming it on my father, then about the search I'd conducted for the file name, turning up the picture on a popular photo-sharing site. The silence as I spoke grew deadly. As I was talking, Nina called up the website again. “It's not there now,” she told me. Whoever'd put it up had taken it down.

“You'd better get home,” I told my father. “If Dot's seen this, she'll be worrying.”

He nodded and went out, strangely silent, as if his fears had grown too weighty for words.

“Be ready to testify if you have to,” Nina said to me when he was gone, her voice cold.

When I walked out to the sidewalk ten minutes later my father was still there, straddling his bike, his helmet crooked over one elbow. He seemed to be waiting for me, but there was a settled heaviness in his limbs, as if he lacked the energy to move.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I have to try to do something about this,” I told him.

“I was thinking I'd head over to Teddy's. I can crash on the couch there, meet you in court tomorrow. Could be the kid'll wake up screaming in the middle of the night, need someone to rock her.”

“Dad,” I said. “Dot's going to read that story tonight. She's going to wonder what it means. Shouldn't you be with her?”

“I know I should, son. But some nights I just can't bear it.”

“You've got to try to bear it,” I told him. “She needs you. And you need her.”

“That's the part neither of us can stand. Because what we've figured out, see, is that needing and having are two different things, and having's not all it's cracked up to be.” He pulled on his helmet, kicked the engine to life, and rode away, leaving me to ponder what he meant. Tomorrow he would testify, taking his fate into his own hands.

I rode the BART back to Oakland, then drove to my office. Once there, I called Tanya. “I was wondering if you'd heard anything about that picture I asked you to show around.”

“You mean the one that's all over the news tonight. I'm not the one who gave it to them. I haven't said a word.”

“I didn't think you had. I was just wondering if you'd had any results.”

“No one's called you?”

“Just some crank calls,” I lied. If I ended up testifying, I'd have to make up my mind what to say about my visit to Mendocino. If asked a direct question, I wouldn't lie, but it didn't mean I'd volunteer facts. That I wouldn't lie under oath didn't mean I'd tell the truth to Tanya, however.

“Someone I talked to, one of my girls, recognized one of those girls from the picture. I'm not saying who, 'cause if my girl doesn't want to talk to you, she doesn't have to. But she gave me a name. Sherrie. No last name, just Sherrie. She pointed me to an ad on Craigslist. I got a phone number.”

“I want to talk to her,” I said.

“So call her. I'll give you the number.”

I couldn't do that. Sherrie, if that was really her name, had told me not to try to find her. “I'll only get one chance at this. I don't want to blow it.”

“Is there anything in it for her? Anything she'd want, I mean?”

“I'm not trying to get her in trouble, if that's what you're asking.”

“You need my help again, you're telling me.”

I wasn't going to beg. “What did you have in mind?”

“I can set it up like a trick. I'll tell her your regular girl left town, and someone recommended her. You can use one of my places. This way, Leo, if she doesn't want to talk to you, at least you can get laid and she can make a buck.”

“Getting laid is the last thing on my mind.”

“You'll have to pay her anyway. And me for the room. Let's say an even six hundred.”

I'd figured she'd only be helping me because she'd seen an opportunity to turn a small profit, so I wasn't surprised. “You don't even know who she is, what she charges.”

“I'm in business, Leo. Think of this as a professional courtesy on my part. Or would you rather owe me a favor?”

She was right. Best to keep the books clear. “Set it up. Six hundred.”

“No promises,” she said and ended the call.

~ ~ ~

I thought of calling Eric before I drove over there, then decided against it. After that article in the paper, I doubted he'd be anywhere but home, nursing his wounded reputation.

I drove into the city to his neighborhood and parked half a block from his house. Lights shone in the upstairs windows. I sat watching the house for a few minutes, still unsure how to play my approach. As I waited, the garage door swung up and a black Porsche 911 backed out. Jackson was at the wheel.

The garage door remained open; I waited until the car turned the corner, then pulled into the spot. Eric stood with his arms crossed in the entrance. “I can't talk to you,” he said as I got out.

“Why, just because you're listed as a witness for the prosecution?”

“You know the rules. You have to contact me through my lawyer. And you know what he'll tell you. You might as well just turn around and go.”

“I'm not here to talk about the case.”

He stood for a moment, visibly torn, then punched the button to lower the garage door. “Fine. Want a beer?”

“Sure.”

Wordlessly he took two Stellas from the fridge. Evidently I didn't merit the top-shelf stuff anymore. “You must have seen the papers today.”

“Ah. So you're here to apologize, to tell me that it's all part of the adversarial system, smearing my character, meaning I'm not supposed to take it personally. Well, don't worry. I don't. That's my lawyer's job. In any case, this will pass, and in a few years, when I'm in Sacramento, or maybe even Washington, no one will remember a thing.”

“I didn't leak the picture.”

“That's not what Jackson thinks. Anyway, you told me you weren't going to talk about your father's case, and now we are. You know as well as I do that your father sent me that picture, that he's been the one who was blackmailing me.”

“I know what happened at George Chen's house.” I'd checked the property records and put a name to the owner of the Mendocino house. Chen was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who'd contributed the maximum each election cycle to Eric Gainer's campaigns. He'd also underwritten a number of Gainer's pet causes, including a highly successful program to keep at-risk kids in school. “George's in China. He's opening his firm's Beijing office, but he left you a key and the use of his house. I've been there. I've been inside. It's a great place to bring girls without the risk of someone snapping a photo. Except that's exactly what happened, isn't it?”

“I don't know what your father thinks. Ask him.”

“He couldn't be the blackmailer, because he doesn't know anything about your having pushed Lucy Rivera off the railing when you were drunk. He also doesn't know what happened to the other girl in the picture. Sherrie. The witness.”

Eric sank into a chair. I saw by the look on his face that as far as he believed, both girls were dead, and that he hadn't thought it possible that anyone still living could know about his crimes. “Russell told his lies to your father,” he said. “That's where you got this.”

“There's no question in my mind that Bell deserved what he got,” I continued, ignoring him. “If he'd lived, he'd own you.”

Eric tilted his head back, gazing at me with shock and understanding. “I won't testify. I'll tell them I changed my mind, like I did when they wanted to retry Russell.”

“You can delay things by not taking the stand tomorrow, but eventually it's all going to come out. The question is who's going to tell it?”

“Or rather, will the person telling it be believed?”

“Oh, I think so. This photo's just the tip of the iceberg. They haven't found Lucy's body yet. I took a look over the railing while I was at Chen's. There's a shelf of rock about a hundred yards down. Russell wouldn't have left her there, but he knew better than to get rid of the body like he promised you and Jackson. Nobody would have believed him unless he could show a corpse.”

Eric looked me in the eye. “Okay. If that's how you want to play it, she's in the freezer at Chen's. At least, that's what Russell told me, when he revealed who she was, how he'd corrupted her. Made her into the perfect victim. He bragged to me that he could give her a knife and tell her to cut herself, and she'd do it. I haven't looked in the freezer for myself. I haven't been out there since that night, and I don't intend to go back. Is that what you wanted to know? I didn't sleep with her. I didn't know who she was. That part, at least, wasn't my fault.”

His guilt was devastatingly simple, and his surrender far too easy. He was calling my bluff, the only thing he could do. “Bell
was
blackmailing you.”

“You could say the mask came off. He had a hold on me and he wasn't going to let go. It wasn't about money. It was hatred. Revenge. Gary Coles was dead but I was still alive. He set out, step by step, to tear away the foundation of my life, of my success, by re-creating his crime and then completing it as he hadn't managed to do the first time. He found a way to get his hooks into Lucy again, and then he used her to have his revenge on me. She was an addict, and I think mentally ill. By the time he brought her to me, Russell had her completely under his control.”

It was almost like he was trying to persuade himself that she was better off dead. “You went to Jackson with your problem.”

“I didn't have to. Your father took care of it for me.”

“I can see how you'd prefer believing that to accepting that Jackson had Russell murdered. But don't you see, someone's been playing us both?”

“Call the police. Tell them where to find the body, if you really think it's there. Because I'm not going to be blackmailed again. Not by your father, not by you. If you think you're going to turn the focus of this trial on me and my brother, blame us for your father's situation, it's going to backfire. You have to understand, Leo, that I'll do anything to protect my family, and my brother will do the same. You of all people ought to know where I'm coming from on that.”