Panther's Prey (6 page)

I did the math. She'd have been back at her place by then, no sign of an intruder. “What did she say?”

“Nothing, really. She said she was sure that I was safe. I didn't need to worry about the publicity of the trial stirring things up. She kept repeating I was safe, until finally I just said, ‘Okay, I believe you.' That was it.”

“Did you text or e-mail her earlier that night?”

“No. We always just talked.”

“Has anyone from the police contacted you, asked you questions about her death?”

“I've been waiting, but you're the first person I've heard from. I'm scared. I'd have gone to the police, but they've already proved they can't protect anyone. All they care about is showing that Rodriguez was guilty all along.”

“I don't know how much Jordan told you, but it does look as if he killed her.” I said this as gently as I was able to. “If he did this, he probably raped Janelle Fitzpatrick, too. He confessed to both crimes. The facts of your case are superficially similar, but what Jordan told me when we first considered you as a witness was that they weren't similar enough. I agreed with her at the time, and I still do. We could never prove it was the same guy.”

Britney shook her head, still clinging to the hope Jordan had kindled. “Rodriguez was innocent of that rape. He'd confess to any notorious crime. Isn't that what the psychologist said when she testified? Jordan was too smart to be fooled by someone like that.”

“But even if Rodriguez is innocent, that still doesn't mean the same person committed all three of these crimes. I know you're hungry for answers, but it's a huge leap to conclude that just because you were raped and Janelle Fitzpatrick was raped and Jordan was raped, the same person's responsible. There're a lot of bad people out there.”

“But if I am right, that means I'm in danger, right? Jordan said we weren't in danger, but I think she was scared.”

“Tell me everything she said to you the last time you talked.”

We'd stopped under a huge date palm. “Like I said, right after the verdict she'd mentioned the idea of getting the
Chronicle
to do a story about me. You know: ‘rape victim still waiting for justice,' that kind of thing. She said she'd suggested it to her reporter friend, who seemed interested. She wasn't committing to doing a story yet, but she wanted to set up a meeting. Jordan was going to call me in the morning with the place and time.”

“What was this reporter's name?” This could have been the person who'd texted Jordan.

“Rachel Stone. She wrote about your verdict, and she did a story about Jordan's death. I expected her to contact me but she never did.”

I asked her what else Jordan had said to her the night of her death. “Just that we didn't have to be afraid,” she repeated as we circled back toward the entrance. “She said that at least twice. ‘He won't come after you, and he won't come after me.' But he must already have been nearby when she told me that.” She shut her eyes. “Maybe even outside her door.”

I gave her my card, and encouraged her to keep in touch. But I still couldn't bring myself to believe in a panther with no face, no
name. If Jordan hadn't deemed this theory good enough for the jury, why had she picked it up again after the verdict? What had kept her from discussing it further with me?

Most troubling of all, why had she given Britney false hope that her attacker might be brought to justice?

I'd picked up a used Yamaha motorcycle a few months before, regarding it as a suitable compromise between the demands of living in the city and my occasional need for escape. A parking slot in a building not far from my hotel had been included with the bike at a grandfathered rate. On the Friday of my first week of medical leave, I rode across the bay to Teddy's house, knowing the ride would be a good chance to think.

In contrast with his former agility of mind, the new Teddy was painfully clumsy, his old confidence having given way to self-consciousness. He was prone to lapses in memory and confusion, and he was incapable of making quick judgments. Physically he looked the same, except for the bright dimple of the scar on his brow, the scar usually kept hidden by a wide-brimmed hat. He carried his regained weight easily on his bearlike, six-foot frame.

“We've missed you,” Tamara said at dinner.

“It's just that I've been busy with work. There was the trial, then, after that, I was two weeks behind on everything else. Now I'm on
leave.” I explained about Gabriela telling me I wasn't mentally fit to represent clients. I didn't tell them that I'd concluded my “leave” was, in fact, a pretext for keeping me out of sight and discrediting me while the state built its case against Randall Rodriguez.

“You're tearing yourself to pieces about that girl,” Teddy said.

I shook my head. I couldn't put into words the tumult of conflicting emotions I felt each night when I lay down to toss and turn on my thin mattress. Needing to change the subject, I said, “Heard from Dad?”

“He seems to be staying put, according to the last postcard he sent Carly.”

With a possible murder charge hanging over his head, I doubted he'd be back. Lawrence had Bo Wilder to thank for that, as surely as Teddy and I had him to thank for the burning of our office.

Carly and I played in the backyard while Teddy and Tamara cleaned up after dinner, one of their typical one-pot concoctions that required neither recipe nor forethought, just open the fridge and see what's there.

Carly ran up and down on the grass, making a game of bringing me all the toys from her playhouse back by the fence under the persimmon. “Unk-ah ‘eo!” she called out to me, screaming with laughter. I wondered if she missed Lawrence, gone now for nearly three months on his travels, having absented himself from her life almost as abruptly as he'd reentered ours. I tried not to blame him, but I knew Teddy did.

Lawrence had had the good fortune to be acquitted in his retrial. He'd be a fool to put his head on the block again.

Tamara came out to the patio table with a glass of lemonade, leaving Teddy to finish up inside. I stayed on the grass playing with Carly. But when she began to seem bored with me, I went to sit with my sister-in-law. Tamara gave me a wan smile, but the fatigue showed around her eyes, and she wouldn't meet my gaze. Ever since the fire, nothing was the same.

“We have a gun in the house now. Did he tell you that?” she asked, proving our thoughts were on the same wavelength.

Her acuity had improved drastically over the years. Every once in a while, like now, it was possible to hold a normal conversation without her spacing out, especially when, as now, she was consulting the notebook she always kept close at hand, where she wrote down everything of importance. It appeared she had a list of topics ready to bring up with me.

My last lunch with Teddy a few weeks ago seemed a different lifetime. “He told me.”

“It doesn't make me feel safer. It makes me think that before this is over, he's going to end up shooting himself or me.”

“My feeling is the fire was probably the end of it. If Bo wanted us dead, we would be. But I'll talk to Teddy about it.”

“What about this coworker of yours who got murdered?”

This leap gave me a start. “The police have the guy in jail. He confessed, evidently. Bo didn't have anything to do with what happened to Jordan.”

“I'm sorry to sound this way,” she said. “But we're seeing bogeymen here, every night. Meanwhile, your father, the cause of it all, gets to live happily ever after thousands of miles away. The least he could have done was write a check from some of those settlement funds. The fire cut off Teddy's income. Even if he goes back on disability, there's not enough.”

“I feel responsible. From now on, I should be able to help more.”

She shook her head. “That's not what I was saying. I know it's wrong to be afraid all the time. But I'd never have thought they'd go as far as they did.”

Tamara's gaze remained fixed on Carly, sitting under the lemon tree beside the neighbor's calico cat, its tail flicking as Carly experimentally stroked its fur. Then, as if at some unheard signal, the cat's tail went straight up. It shot toward the fence and was over it in a bound.

At dinner we covered our awkwardness with one another by focusing our shared attention on the child. A natural show-off, and fortunately still too young to pick up on the undercurrents between adults, Carly drank up our attention, running through her whole routine of faces and repeating the few words she knew.

I read a bedtime story; then Tamara put her to bed. Teddy and I took our beers to the patio. A long silence was followed by this revelation: “Bo Wilder's been calling me. Late at night, from prison, on a contraband cell.”

I digested this. Finally I said, “You don't have to answer when he calls.”

“We can't live in fear anymore. I need to earn a living. Bo knows I can't afford to walk away.”
The way you could,
his tone seemed to add. “I have a family to think about.”

“So what are you saying?”

He seemed to have trouble getting it out, gazing off toward the persimmon tree, his face twisting before he answered. “You and me, we never really talked about my work. The summer I got shot, when you were working for me, I always meant to sit you down and ask you if this was really what you wanted to do with your life, defend guys like Ricky Santorez. Guys like Bo Wilder. But next thing I knew I was lying in a hospital bed. And now you're the alpha dog and I'm the one who runs behind picking up scraps.”

I nodded for him to go on. I owed it to him to hear him out, even if it was years too late for what he was saying to make any difference.

“What I would have told you if we'd ever had that heart-to-heart talk is this: being my brother, certain people are going to expect things from you that they don't have any earthly right to expect. Brilliance, for one. At least, back in the day, that's what I'd have said. Nowadays, not so much.”

The old brilliance still showed in sparks, as well as the ego that went with it. But there was no way to fan that near-dead coal back into flame.

“The fact is,” he continued, “being in your line of work, Bo Wilder has the right to expect that certain arrangements I had with certain people—Santorez being one—are still in effect, only with you standing in my shoes.”

“Because of what he did for Dad.” I was speaking of the murder of Russell Bell, the snitch who otherwise would have testified against my father and put him back in prison.

Teddy nodded and shrugged. “And if they're not, he'll feel that someone owes him. Because in this world that he runs in, no privilege ever dies. Everything that's worth anything gets handed on, like rights of inheritance. That goes for people, too, everyone who's ever played a useful role. There's no such thing as an unowned man.”

“I don't accept that, and neither should you.”

“You wanted to follow in my footsteps. Look, I'm sorry if I never explained what that meant. I figured, a smart kid like you, people'd talk, you'd listen, and you'd figure out pretty quick what you were getting into and chart a different path.”

Kid.
Five years ago, that description had sounded natural. “I always believed in you. Even when all the signs pointed to you being dirty, even when you'd been shot in the head, everyone saying you deserved it, I told them they were full of shit.” Once, these words would have come with the heat of my disappointment behind them. These days, I'd long since come to terms with who my brother was, what he'd done, the price he'd paid.

“What was I supposed to do? Come out and tell you I was a crook? I didn't want to shatter your expectations, Leo. On the other hand, I could have given you Jeanie's old desk, since you were dying for a chance like that. But I kept you at arm's length. I
definitely wanted to teach you a few survival skills, but when the time came, I was gonna push you out of the nest. Then … “ He made a gun with two fingers and shot himself in the head.

“So the next thing you're going to tell me is you knew this day would come.”

“It seemed for a while you were in the clear. You probably were in the clear as long as Santorez stayed alive. I didn't count on Bo reopening accounts Santorez had considered closed. And I certainly didn't count on anything like that fire. What I mean to say is, I'm sorry.”

I just nodded. I felt so tired. Whatever Teddy had been before, he'd changed, or so I'd thought. But now he was telling me he was going back to working beyond the pale of the law, or at least with one foot over the edge.

Monday I left a message for Rachel Stone, the
Chronicle
reporter, mentioning Jordan's name and Britney's. I gave her my cell number and asked her to phone back. Her most recent piece had been written the day after Jordan's murder. She'd portrayed Jordan as an idealist whose liberal intentions had opened a Pandora's box. The story was structured in three parts. First came a recitation of the circumstances of the attack, ending with the moment when Jordan must have recognized her assailant as the man whose freedom she'd won in the courtroom just one week before.

Next there was a summary of Jordan's courtroom performance, with a quote from an interview after the verdict expressing her absolute confidence in our client's innocence.

Finally, the article concluded with a description of the crime scene at Jordan's apartment, the details of broken glass, splattered blood, and duct tape supplying the moral it would have been tasteless of Stone to spell out. I hated her as I read it, but I couldn't
help crediting the lawyerly skill with which she'd let her narrative present her argument.

I also read the two previous pieces she'd done on the Rodriguez case. Britney had called her Jordan's friend, and in the story covering the verdict she'd placed the fault for Rodriguez's acquittal squarely on the police department and the DA's office, cataloging their missteps. In these pieces, the PD's office came in for a more favorable portrayal than was usual from Stone. As a matter of principle, she liked to draw attention to the constitutional “technicalities” that freed our clients, the evidence we managed to suppress, and all the other tactics by which we persuaded jurors to embrace gauzy doubt and abandon common sense.

Just before noon, my phone buzzed. I answered it and agreed to Stone's brusque suggestion that we meet in a half hour at the tearoom on top of Yerba Buena Gardens.

“Sit,” she said when I approached her table on the outdoor patio. Her voice had the raspy note of a former smoker, contrasting with her aura of athletic fitness and health. She had a sharp, alert face and short silver hair that curled at the tips.

“There's a minimum charge, so you may as well order something,” she said, eyeing me up and down as if she disapproved of my cargo shorts and hoodie. In all fairness, I
was
underdressed, but I'd come as I was.

She requested the “Moorish tea service,” which the menu described as vegetable kebobs over kale salad and a pot of mint tea. I ordered a grilled cheese, which nearly brought me to the mandatory minimum, and also a coffee, which the waitress informed me they didn't have. Black tea, then, I told her. Stone observed this exchange like a professor watching an unprepared student fail an entry-level test.

Evidently her restrained view of Rodriguez's defense team hadn't survived Jordan's death. “I have to say, I was hoping Jordan would have had better taste in men.”

“Like Tom Benton?” It was a shot in the dark.

She studied me for a moment as if to gauge how much I knew, then looked away. “Poor Tommy” was all she said.

I was intrigued to learn that apparently she knew Tom Benton, but I let it pass for now. “I hear Jordan, before she died, was trying to talk you into writing about a serial rapist. I need to ask you about that.”

“The ‘Panther,'” she said, both mocking the sensationalist tone and taking pleasure in it.

“It was an idea we'd thrown around, brainstorming Rodriguez's defense, but we never had anything to support it. I was surprised to hear she was pursuing it again.”

“You're surprised any defense lawyer cared. Isn't that it? What you normally do is put on your big show in the courtroom, then forget about it the minute the trial's over. Well, Jordan actually seemed to believe Rodriguez was innocent. Apparently, she felt an obligation to act on that belief. A true believer, isn't that what you'd call her in your business?”