Motion to Suppress (14 page)

"Janine found out, I don’t know how. I admitted it. She was loading the kids in the station wagon, and I was trying to talk her out of it. She left anyway."

"I can imagine how you must have felt that night."

"You can’t imagine."

"Maybe you went by Misty’s house later that Thursday night for a shoulder to cry on. It was late enough for her to be off her shift, and they have those sliding glass doors in back that open out onto the yard and the Keys. Easy to see if she was alone, right? You could just peek in and see if the coast was clear. What did you see? Did you see him come after her? And her hitting him with that statue?"

"I spent that evening with my wife trying to patch things up," Clarke said dully, and then more vigorously, "I wish I had been there to finish that bastard off. Oh, hell, what’s the point? Look, I told you, I have to go. It took awhile before Janine moved in again. It’s been rough. Things are better. Not fixed. Can we go now?"

"Do you own a bike? You know, a motorcycle?"

"I knew I should have brought my own car. Yeah. I have an old Honda 400cc. A Hawk. So what?"

"Just wondering." It was hard to imagine Clarke wearing Harley wings on any article of clothing. He would be too worried about the school board.

"You ask me one more question, Mr. van Wagoner, I’m going to call a cab," Clarke said.

Paul looked surprised. "All you had to do was ask," he said mildly, pulling out the van keys.

Misty lay on her bunk wishing she could sleep. The guard had just finished the afternoon cell check, and the wing remained relatively quiet, though so stifling that she imagined she could see wavery heat lines. "There probably hasn’t been any fresh air in here since the place was built," she said to her cellmate.

"Could be worse," Delores said. She stood in front of the six-inch metal mirror above the sink, trying to comb her thick black hair into French braids that would fold back into her scalp. "Come here and help me with this." Misty climbed off her bunk. "You move slow, like a big girl," Delores said.

"This place is making me sick. I hate the food. I want to sleep but I can’t get enough," Misty said.

She held Delores’s hair in place and stuck in a plastic comb.

"I just need to get out of here," Misty said. "Three more days, my lawyer says."

Delores said, "How do I look?" She turned in a full circle. Delores was fifty-three years old, but, as she kept telling Misty, that helped her on her shoplifting excursions. The clerks at K mart paid more attention to the young girls.

"Even without makeup, you look great," Misty said. "It’s your smile."

"It’s my joy de vivre," Delores said, but she cut her laugh short as she watched Misty fall on the bunk again and close her eyes. "Babe, you are in a tough situation. Why don’t you get up and fight?"

"What if I did it?" Misty said from the bunk, her eyes still closed.

"Hush, now. The walls have ears."

"I’ve been thinking, Del. I’m the one who ran around on him. I’m the one who made him crazy. He wasn’t like that in Fresno. If he knew what I was doing, it would explain a lot."

"He could have left you instead of hitting you," Del said.

"He still loved me. I guess I hurt him a lot."

"He stayed home and took it."

"Maybe I’m not worth saving," Misty said.

"You’re bad, just plain low-down bad."

"Yeah."

"You’ll never be happy."

’’Mmm-hmmm.’’

"Now look at me. I am a beautiful, very damn smart, and hard-lovin’ African-American woman, in jail right now, yeah, but going to rise above it. You can call me every bad name in the book, but it won’t stick because I know who I am. I decide who I am, and I figure out how to make myself happy." Del sat down with an emphatic thump on the bunk next to Misty. "Do the same. You’re a big girl now."

"Who I am is just plain bad."

Del rolled her eyes up. "No. No. Listen to me. I’m going to tell you this one more time. Doesn’t matter who they say you are! Only thing that matters is who you decide you are!"

"I’m a nobody. My work is to say ’Drinks? Drinks?’ and mosey around with my butt hanging out. And where I’m heading is worse."

Del laughed. "You thought it was hangin’ out before ... Guard! Guard! Get me out of this cell with this no-account woman! You make me want to take you by the shoulders and shake your head clear. You have a new situation now. You don’t have a husband, and you probably don’t have a job either. Today is today and you have to fight!"

"I’m afraid," Misty said. Del got up, shaking her head.

Late that night, when it had cooled down a little, Misty had a nightmare.

She dreamed she was living in an old town, a jumble of brightly colored houses and swaying trees like they had back in the Philippines, with her small daughter. Her father, a famous and kindly doctor, had died a while back. Then one day her beautiful mother took ill and was about to die. An operation could save her, but only her father could perform it.

Misty mixed up a potion so he could arise late in the night in a house across town where her mother lay. He would walk across the floor to her mother’s curtained bed, fix her, and then he would rest in peace. He loved Misty’s mother so much, he would come back from the dead.

Night came, and Misty and her daughter walked through the dark streets and pools of yellow lamplight with the potion.

As they approached the house, Misty became afraid. She knew what she was doing was unnatural, but she had to save her mother. They went up the stairs. Her daughter clutched the brown bag lunch that she was proud to have made herself. In the room, her father’s coffin lay in a murky corner. Her mother, still as death on the bed, lay with her hands folded across her breast, lace falling from her sleeves.

Misty set the potion down on the floor, took her daughter’s hand, and ran out the door. She had done her duty, and now she ran from an awful fear.

I forgot my lunch in there! her daughter said, her white face turned up toward her mother.

Misty said, no, you can’t go back, but her daughter pleaded, saying, oh, please, I’ll run fast. Misty thought of her father, the good, kind man. Okay, hurry!

Her daughter rushed back up the stairs. Misty waited, reeling with dread for her father, her mother, her child, herself. She heard her daughter shrieking, and she wanted to run away, but she ran up the stairs and threw open the door. And there he was—a radiant white skeleton, dressed in his black hat and carrying his doctor’s bag, advancing toward her, closer, his arms outstretched, looking stricken and suffering and murderous, and there was her daughter tossed like a bloody doll in the corner, and she knew he would have to kill her, not out of malice but because he had degenerated into something inhuman now, and she stood there terrified, paralyzed, holding her mother’s car key pointed at him like a talisman while he reached out for her ...

She woke up, shuddering in anguish and fright, and Del was holding her, saying, "Hush, now. Hush, now."

13

FIVE-THIRTY. NINA’S stockinged feet, propped on her paper-strewn desk, were the first things Paul saw as he came in. Behind him, Sandy was saying, "Knock!" in a disgruntled voice.

"Six toes," Paul said. "I suspected you were hiding something."

"Just tired feet, Paul."

"How’s the legal research going?"

"Not good. The search and arrest warrants are probably valid. I mean, Rich Eich had reported his boat stolen, so they sure had a right to board. Then they saw blood. The diver found a body with obvious wounds. A co-worker of the wife’s told them about Misty’s fight with her husband. Misty gave them lots of ammo before and after they read her her Miranda rights. They obtained a warrant before searching her house. They had plenty of probable cause. I have to file some motions to cover all the bases, but the motions won’t go anywhere. That’s the bad news."

Paul lifted an eyebrow. "The good news?"

"Matt is revving up the barbeque for the first time tonight. Want to come over? You can tell me all about Fresno and your look at the evidence locker."

"Sure. You’ll be interested to know that your client’s father threw me out. In case he calls to fire you."

Nina had bent down to put her shoes on. She straightened up quickly. "How come?"

"I asked him for an alibi, but I doubt that was the real reason. I pulled too hard on his chain, pestering him about Misty’s childhood in the Philippines when they lived at the naval air base at Subic."

"Did you learn anything?"

"Not a damn thing. He told me to lay off questions about Misty’s past."

"We can’t let this fall by the wayside, Paul. We have to take it further."

"How far do you want to go?" the detective asked. "We don’t know that the moldy family laundry has anything at all to do with this case. Are you trying to be your client’s lawyer, or her psychiatrist?"

Nina said thoughtfully. "Maybe we should send you to the Philippines."

"Who’s going to pay for it? Tengstedt? Travel thousands of miles to a military base to ask questions about a child who lived there thirteen years ago? Come on, Nina, we’ve played enough with this idea. Let’s start thinking about how somebody else could have killed Patterson."

She sighed and pulled on the other shoe. "I just have this feeling. Maybe it’s the cases I’ve been reading. Did you ever hear of a legal concept called the fruit of the poisonous tree?"

"Seems like I have. Defense lawyers talk about it in hearings to suppress evidence."

"Exactly. It’s used in a motion to suppress. The idea is that if a judge decides a search warrant is invalid, the judge may also, under certain circumstances, suppress the evidence obtained from the use of the warrant. Remember the bloody glove found on O. J. Simpson’s property before the police got a warrant? The judge could have ruled that any testimony about the existence of the glove was inadmissible, which would have maimed the prosecution’s case. The idea is, if the tree, which in this case is the warrant, is poisoned, then the fruits of the tree, that is, the evidence obtained from use of the warrant, is also poisoned."

"Tainted evidence gets suppressed. Everybody pretends it doesn’t exist. Fine. What has that got to do with Subic?" Paul asked.

Nina swiftly sketched a tree on her legal pad. On the trunk, she marked Subic. She drew a big apple on a branch and labeled it.

"Anthony dies," Paul read aloud.

"The fruit of the poisonous tree," Nina said. "Misty had suppressed the tree and the fruit, just like a judge might." She looked at the drawing.

Sandy had come in and was also peering down.

"I believe that Subic started the chain of events that led to Anthony’s death," said Nina.

"Well, that tainted old tree’s too far away to visit," Paul said.

"Auntie Alice!" Sandy announced suddenly, loudly.

Paul looked at Nina significantly and tapped his temple with his forefinger. "No, Sandy, Auntie Alice is still in Kansas with Auntie Em."

"Maybe yours is," Sandy retorted. "My Auntie Alice is a payroll clerk at Subic."

Daylight saving time had finally arrived. Only the first week in May, but not until eight did a few shreds of magenta and orange chase each other across the sky.

Paul knew he had eaten too much grilled steak and baked potato, but it had been worth it. He was in the living room with Matt, lying down on the couch and watching the Giants beat the Dodgers. The women were off putting the kids to bed. Matt had built a big fire, and there was another can of Coors on the burl-wood coffee table. For a brief moment Paul wondered if he shouldn’t settle down with Marilyn, buy a place by the beach, give in to a couple of kids who would kiss him on the cheek at night and call him Daddy, like Matt’s kids did.

Nah.

He got up and put on his windbreaker. It would be a relief to get back to fact-gathering, away from the intuitions Nina passed off as reason. Fact: Anthony Patterson had been chief of security at Prize’s. Fact: Peter La Russa was a pit boss at Prize’s, a friend of Anthony’s. Fact: The client had a reputation with men.

As far as he was concerned, the yellow brick road led straight to Prize’s.

Life in the nineties had lost its glamour, Paul thought as he walked down the gift-shop aisles toward the playing area of Prize’s. Glitter, diamonds, tuxes, limos, flashy shows, liquor, parties, late nights, gambling, even recreational sex had been put away as frivolous and unhealthy in this dour decade.

But glamour lived on in the pleasure domes of Tahoe, if you squinted and suspended your disbelief a little. As he crossed into the huge gaming room, past the shouts from the craps tables, past the croupier stacking chips at a packed roulette table, past the shiny red BMW rotating seductively in front of the Megamachine slots, past the Tonga Bar with its thatched roof and bubbling aquariums, past the long line for the nine o’clock show, Paul felt ready for some action.

Near him one of the dealers, a woman about forty, stood with her arms folded, a single deck displayed on the green baize cloth waiting for customers. "Peter La Russa on shift?" he asked her.

"Right over there," she said, pointing out the pit boss. Her table was in La Russa’s group. On impulse he pulled out a chair, sat down, and handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

"All nickels," he said. She pushed over a stack of green chips, scooped up her deck, and started shuffling. Paul set two of his five-dollar chips on the table. Very fast, her pretty hands twinkling with rings, she dealt him his hole card and turned over a ten for herself, then dealt him a three. He looked at his hole card. Damn, a ten. He tapped the table lightly with his cards, and almost before he was finished tapping received a jack. Bust. He turned his cards over and she showed her last card, another ten, before she took his money.

Next hand, she dealt herself nineteen and he lost with a queen and a seven. For the next ten minutes he played with all his concentration, following the basic strategy, but his stack shrank relentlessly. It seemed like he had hardly sat down when she said, "Bet?" and he saw he’d lost it all. He decided not to drag out his wallet again right then.

"Cocktails?" a voice said as he was rising. He looked down at a nice-looking girl, about thirty-five, her little breasts served up in the black satin like dinner rolls in a fancy napkin, her face inert with boredom. He pictured Misty in that outfit, that night in April. Was her smile as cold? "No, thanks," he said. "Could I talk to you for a minute?"

Her smile dropped back into a thin line. "About Anthony and Misty Patterson," Paul said, but he already knew it was hopeless, she was looking around for help. La Russa came over as though she had called him. The cocktail waitress slipped away.

"Mr. La Russa?" Paul said. "I need to talk to you about Anthony Patterson."

La Russa slicked back greasy gray hair, which matched his shiny gray suit. Soft, beautifully manicured hands laden with heavy gold rings gestured to the wings. "Come on over here," he said. He led the way over to an empty bank of tables and they sat down at one of them.

"Know Anthony Patterson?"

"Yeah. Why do you ask?"

"Know he’s dead?"

"I heard. So tell me again why I should talk to you."

"I’m an investigator for the attorney who represents Misty Patterson," Paul answered, passing over his card.

La Russa jumped up so quickly, he knocked over his club soda. "Shit," he said. "You looked like a cop. I don’t have to talk to you."

"No, but it will look strange if you don’t," Paul said.

La Russa said, "Anthony was a friend of mine. He never should have married Misty, ’cause she made him goddamned unhappy, but I’ll say this, then you can get the hell out: Patterson had a lot going for him, and it’s a fucking shame." He walked rapidly back toward his station inside the next bank of tables. Paul followed. "What were you and Patterson into, Peter?" he said loudly.

"Get Security over here," La Russa told his assistant, who picked up a phone and punched a number. All the dealers were watching, surprised to see a civilian enter the pit area, some of them smoothly dealing out cards at the same time.

A massive shadow stepped forward. Obviously, security was good at Prize’s. "Problem?" he said.

"I have an appointment with Mr. Rossmoor," Paul said. "Could you direct me?"

Stephen Rossmoor waited at the door of the penthouse suite.

"Sorry about your luck tonight," he said, waving Paul to a plush couch under a large, bright painting. "Call me Steve." His grip had just the right pressure, and he was smooth, but he looked young for the job, in his early thirties.

"You I.D.’d me fast," Paul said, looking around him. The penthouse living room was as large as his house back in Monterey. One wall was window, looking down over the sparkling lights of the gaming district. Through the inner door he could see a desk and conference table. The whole place seemed to be carpeted in pale gray fur and furnished with antiques older than California. "You live here?"

"My home is in Zephyr Cove, but I spend the night here now and then. Drink?"

"Whatever you have," Paul said. It was Chivas, straight up. Rossmoor sat down at the other end of the couch. He wasn’t drinking.

Paul had done some background checking on Rossmoor. Yale ’82, Princeton for his master’s, a miserly Connecticut grandpa who had left him a bundle. Paul knew and despised Ivy League, the buttons on the Oxford shirt collar, the hair a little mussed but short enough, the class ring, the scuffed but expensive loafers, M.B.A.’s sliding easily into the jobs of men who had worked their way up. Rossmoor fit the stereotype, except he had the fresh-air browning of a tennis player or swimmer, a big difference between him and the pasty faces Paul remembered from the East.

Inherited money always bugged Paul. It might not buy happiness, but it bought the deep-seated security and ease that Stephen Rossmoor possessed. Paul had been a scholarship-and-loans boy. He resented the rich kids.

"Mr. La Russa didn’t want to talk to me," Paul said.

"I told him not to," Rossmoor said.

"What kind of liability is the club worried about?"

"Just the usual risk management, Paul. How is Misty? Is she having trouble putting up the bail?"

"She’ll probably be out tomorrow."

"Great. And her parents are helping her with the legal fees?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I want to help. I’d like to see that she gets off as lightly as possible. My attorney says she might be offered a plea bargain for probation if you push the self-defense angle."

He sounded sincere. Paul said, "Nina Reilly should talk to you directly."

"I’ll talk to her."

"I need to ask you a few questions about the Pattersons."

"Be my guest."

"Fine," Paul said. "Let’s start with your relationship with Michelle Patterson. Misty."

"She’s an employee, has been for over a year." Rossmoor scratched his head. "I admit to a personal interest in Misty. It would be hard to find a male employee who didn’t have one, actually."

"You’re close?"

"No, I wouldn’t say that. I wanted a relationship, but she didn’t."

"Tell me about it."

"She came up with me for a drink before work just a few times. We talked, got to know each other a little bit. The truth is, I found myself rather suddenly getting serious about her. She didn’t seem to want that."

"When was this?"

"The early part of March. She was working till midnight, and Patterson worked midnight to eight A.M., graveyard. I never deluded myself that I was the only one she was seeing," Rossmoor went on. "But I didn’t want to know."

"Patterson might have had a nasty reaction if he found out," Paul said.

"He never found out, I don’t think. And from my point of view, she was another man’s wife but she was unhappy and trying to get up the strength to divorce him. I’m single. My intentions were ... honorable."

"She stopped seeing you?"

"She dropped me, to be honest. I don’t know why. I wanted ... a lot more. Actually, I still do."

"Does she still have a job here?"

"Sure, if she wants it. Sure."

"I don’t know, I’m just asking," Paul said. "I mean, she’s supposed to have killed another employee here. You’d think his friends would be unhappy to see her again."