Lion Plays Rough (14 page)

She gathered her hand into a fist, crooking her index finger. But instead of tracing a name she pushed the sheet of yellow notepaper my way, then reached up and turned the oxygen on all the way. From somewhere she'd produced a book of matches. She held it, looking at me levelly, then made a striking motion with her hands; I lunged forward, but it was only a feint. She produced a roaring sound with her tongue against her teeth, the sound of an accelerant taking flame.

I wondered if she'd always been crazy or if working for Nikki Matson had made her that way. I grabbed the piece of notepaper and got out of there, her metallic coughs echoing behind me.

Chapter 19

On the sheet was an address and a time: 2300 Crestwood Boulevard, 8:00
pm
. Nikki's home in the hills, on a dead end off Skyline Boulevard, high above the flatlands. You couldn't have walked the boundaries of her lot without a climbing rope and harness; cables and pylons held the structure in place. I wondered what perverse impulse had inspired a three-hundred-pound woman to live on a thin shelf of steel and glass suspended from a crumbling mountainside.

She had money; that was certain, more than I would have supposed, even for one of the city's most successful underworld lawyers. The place was lit inside and out by floodlights. I wondered whom she was afraid of. With clients like hers, I guess I would have been uneasy, too. Her Lincoln was in the driveway. There were no other cars, but that didn't mean she was alone. I figured that if Damon wanted to see me again, he knew where I lived; he didn't need to lure me here.

There was a security camera at the door. I pressed the buzzer, and after a pause the lock clicked open. Nikki met me in the slate-floored front hall. On the wall above a thick rug was a picture of riders in red jackets and their striding, hungry dogs. “Come out to the balcony!” she boomed. “We can talk there. What are you drinking?”

I followed her through the living room, which was entirely white—from the marble floor to the couches—and out to the balcony. “A beer, if you've got it.” The house was a box with a living room, kitchen, office, and bedroom, maybe six hundred square feet.

“You can have gin or vodka,” she said. “I only keep white liquor. No beer.”

“Whatever you're having.”

The balcony was small but jutted out into empty space to spectacular effect. Oakland, San Francisco, and the bay all were laid out beneath us. I never got tired of that view, but at the moment, at least, Nikki seemed immune to it. She brought me vodka on ice, a drinker's drink. We sat in aluminum chairs, troubling in their lightness above all that empty space.

“I can offer you one twenty a year, not a penny more.”

It was a third higher than her last offer. “Sure. Maybe that's just what I need. A change of employers, a mentor with her finger on the pulse. And six months from now, a bullet in the head.”

“That's good,” she said. “Very good. Maybe you do have a future in the courtroom, even if I doubt it, from what I've heard. Don't worry, Leo. Everyone loses. Some of us more than others, but everyone now and then.”

“You're not really offering me a job, even if I were stupid enough to take it. You and I both know what you want.”

“What
I
want.”

“What your client wants.”

She inclined her head, giving me the blankest of smiles, letting me understand that we both knew we were talking about Damon.

“I met him the other night,” I went on. “He really doesn't have much impulse control, does he? It seemed clinical to me, but I'm not a psychiatrist. You might want to get an expert to work up a diagnosis.”

“Some impulses are worth controlling. Some aren't.” She straightened her leg, letting her foot rest near my ankle.

“You know what impulses I'm talking about. The murderous kind. He held my brother and me at gunpoint and would have killed us. I suppose sooner or later you'd have seen the pictures, once they sorted out the jurisdictional question.”

“What jurisdictional question?” She seemed to pay no attention, as if she were only marking time before she made her move. She had poise; I had to give her that. I was beginning to realize how much of what she showed to the world was an act.

“Whether to prosecute him in state or federal court for murder,” I said, forcing myself to go on. “It was federal land. Up at the old VA hospital. I got a tip that he and Campbell were meeting up there and I went and there he was.”

“Corpus delicti.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“You know what I mean. You're just out of law school. Tell me they're still teaching the Latin. You'd have to show me a body before anything you're saying makes sense. It's murder you're talking about, and as far as I can see, no one's dead. You see, Leo, I'm really not interested in hypothetical questions. I limit myself to facts.”

“I'm sure it would have been very interesting to you if you'd been there. It probably would have turned you on, a little fear, the promise of blood. After all, you never see him in the act. You come in afterward and clean up, then frame some chump for it. Like Jamil. You set him up pretty nicely for that murder.”

“Come back to me when you've got that hole in your head.”

“I'd rather find a way to prevent that. That's why I'm here.”

“If I'm not going to pay you for your services, what am I to pay you for?”

“Security. Yours and mine. You're just as much in the soup with Damon as I am, and maybe more. I know you're the one who gave those pictures to the TV station and issued that phony statement. I may be Damon's target now, but I can be convincing when I need to be. I kept my mouth shut the other night, but there's no guarantee I won't talk next time he gets hold of me. How far do you think he trusts you?”

“Anything is negotiable, but you can't guarantee your own silence. When someone really wants you to talk, you'll talk. No, I think I prefer it my way. You say what you want and I deny it.”

“The guarantee is two people with the same problem and the same solution. Your client has more enemies than he can count. He's wondering who set him up, making his lists and checking them twice. It wasn't Jamil who hired me. Damon knows that, but he had Jamil strung up anyway, for appearances. You probably carried the order to Damon's man inside, whether you knew it or not. Probably you pretended not to know, but he's no dummy; he won't believe he has you fooled. It seems like you're pretty high above it all up here, but at night you can hear the gunshots if you listen. And when Damon turns against you, when he begins to suspect you, when he finally decides that you're more risk than use to him, all the locks in the world won't keep him from coming through that door. If he thinks you betrayed him, you're done.”

She seemed amused. “And where would he get that idea? From you, I suppose.”

“He's on a hair trigger is all. He gets an idea in his head, from whatever source; he doesn't second-guess. He just picks up a gun and does what he has to do. How many others can there be with the knowledge and opportunity to sell him out? You were Jamil's lawyer. You had a copy of the pictures. It looks bad enough on its own. But then there's the fact that sooner or later you
will
betray him, at least from his point of view—because he's on a downward spiral and at some point you're going to want to get off the ride.”

“You're barking up the wrong tree, my friend, if you think threatening me will get you anywhere.” She settled lower in her chair with her drink. “I learned something about myself a long time ago. However far anyone else is willing go, I can go further. There's no absolute limit on what I might do, or how much I can hurt you, and I won't feel a damn thing one way or another about it, and I won't play by any of the rules you seem to believe in. No, Leo, you don't want to play the game my way. You'll find out pretty soon how little stomach you have for it.”

“Your practice can't revolve around Damon's crew forever. A man like that, he can't go around pretending to be a businessman much longer, not when the whole world knows half the drugs in Oakland go through him. What happens when the money runs out? You walk away? You really think so?”

She contemplated me for a moment, sipping her drink. “You're a cocky kid. Too cocky. I don't think you have anything for me. I think you're bluffing.”

“You're on his list, whether you admit it or not. My guess is that you know more than you'd like to know about how Jamil ended up hung to death in his cell at Santa Rita. How much is a disloyal lawyer worth?”

“Obviously that depends on the lawyer. How much are
you
worth?”

“What I really had in mind was an exchange. Maybe we could just talk it through together.”

“Fine. You start.”

“There's who hired me, which is the question you asked me last time we met. And then there's why, which happens to be the answer I want to know.”

“I think you'll find that
who
is a very good question in our line of work. If you're arguing about why, you've already given too much ground. Stick to who.”

“I happen to find why more interesting.”

“Then you're on the wrong side of the bar. I thought you must have learned how to be ruthless from your brother, but maybe you're truly a sap. If that's the case, then it would be a waste of my time to go on protecting you. You can't protect a sap from himself.”

I let her comment about protecting me pass, but it gave me an ominous intimation, a chill that was deeper than the growing chill of the evening. Maybe Campbell had saved our lives that night, or maybe he'd just been playing his part in a larger piece of theater. It'd seemed real enough, but I had a vision of how it might have been worked, Campbell and Damon the actors on stage, Nikki in the background pulling the ropes and working the lights, making sure that when I fell there'd be a net to catch me, just off the ground.

But that would mean that Lavinia was in league with Campbell and had been from the start, playing a deeper game than I'd suspected. I didn't believe in conspiracies, at least not the kind that required the conspirators to be smarter than I was. At bottom, most conspiracies were founded on stupidity, not cleverness. A clever conspirator doesn't conspire; he works alone.

“Let's start with Campbell,” I said.

“What about him?”

“Campbell and Damon. They grow up in the same neighborhood, boyhood friends, all that stuff. One grows up to be a cop; his pal ends up on the other side. Against all odds, the friendship survives. Do I have it right?”

“Like I told you, I don't deal in hypothetical questions.”

“There are two Campbells, the way I see it. Two possibilities. The way things appear now—the way someone wants them to appear—is that Campbell and Damon are the same thing, except that Campbell has a badge and Damon doesn't. A dirty cop and the dirt he rolled in.”

“All cops are dirty. You ought to know that,” she said. “Or maybe you haven't learned your catechism. Every word that comes out of a cop's mouth is a lie, and all of our clients are innocent. It's either a frame-up or a cock-up.” She held up her glass, and after a moment I realized that she expected me to refill it. I rose, took it from her, went to the bar just inside the door, poured a hefty dose of vodka over ice, and brought it back. I hadn't touched mine.

“A frame-up, then. I'm not asking you to reveal your client's secrets—but did Campbell plant that gun on Jamil?”

“I think revealing client secrets is exactly what you're asking me to do. Assuming that I had a client who figured in this discussion.” She'd turned her chair to face the bay. I smelled eucalyptus, heard the screech of a BART train braking into MacArthur Station. Then from farther off came a rapid
pop-pop-pop
, like a noise heard at the edge of sleep.

“Maybe I'm naïve, but I don't see how someone so corrupt could have risen so high in the police department. Or why he would jeopardize what he's earned.” I could play naïve if that's what she wanted.

She snorted. Her second drink was nearly gone. “You're young. You still care why people do the things they do. In a few years you'll understand that the why doesn't matter. He wanted this so he went and did that. Uh-uh. Neat little motives don't explain a thing. Christ, you'd have to be a cop to believe that.”

“What I'm saying is he didn't get to be a detective by looking out for his friends. That must have come later, after he'd already become what he was. He must have been good at his job once. He must have believed in it. I don't see how he got from there to planting a murder weapon on an innocent man.”

“Try boredom. There's not much in this life that boredom doesn't explain.”

Maybe it was as simple as that. “Fair enough. But someone obviously was sitting on this, waiting for their moment. Why did Campbell have to be brought down now? That's the question we have to answer.”

“That's just another way of asking who. And
we
don't have to answer anything.”

“Not another way of asking. A better way.” I went on quickly. “You want me to put my cards on the table? Here they are. I know who came to me, but I don't know who's behind that person. I want to know the identity of the person pulling the strings as much as you do.” I thought of the voice on the phone pretending to be Jamil, a voice that might have been the voice of a white man trying to sound black.

“And you think I can enlighten you—and that I would even if I could. If I knew anything, what would I need you for?”

“I thought you don't like hypotheticals.”

“Fine. What do I need you for, Leo?”

“There's knowing and then there's knowing. I'm ninety-five percent certain this person came to me because of a case Campbell was investigating. I have a feeling that you have a pretty good idea how Campbell spent his days. I bet you could give me a short list. But you need insulation. You need to keep pretending not to know what happened, and you need to keep blaming Jamil and me. But you also need to be ready for when Damon realizes that Jamil didn't set him up, and that the folks who put his face on the evening news are still out there.”

“What I could do and what I will do for you are different things. I've done more than I should, more than any prudent person would. If it weren't for me you'd be dead. I said, No, the kid's just a sap. He's being played and he doesn't even know it. Don't prove me wrong. I like you, Leo, despite my better instincts. I don't want to see anything happen to you, but then again it wouldn't bother me much. My advice is to back off, go home, be there in the morning to make sure your brother remembers to wipe his ass.”