The Big Exit (18 page)

C
AROLYN CALLS
M
ADDEN’S CELL PHONE ONCE AT ELEVEN THIRTY
, then again at noon. He isn’t picking up, so she leaves two short, matter-of-fact messages, each stating the time of her
call and telling him to get back to her when he gets a chance.

Finally, just before twelve thirty, she sees his caller ID info come up on her phone.

“Did you get the guy?” she asks.

“We got his partner.”

“Partner?”

“Yeah, the big one. Ask your client about him.”

“You get anything out of him?”

“Maybe.”

“What’s that mean?”

“We’ve still got some work to do. Where are you?”

She smiles, looking around. She’s standing outside her car in a small park down the road from the hotel on Sand Hill. The
setting is particularly significant for Madden—as well as her. It’s where the shooting took place. She witnessed it from a
surveillance van not more than fifty yards away from this very spot.

“I’m in that little Stanford Hills Park you made famous.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Don’t ask,” she says. “You in your car?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Fair enough. When are you going to be back in the office?”

“An hour or so. Gotta make a couple of stops. Why, you coming in?”

“Looking that way.”

“I don’t want to warn you again, Carolyn, but I will. I’m not trying to play you. Her story’s taking on water. She’s sinking
fast.”

She’s been waiting for this. The moment when he really shows his cards. Not all of them. But enough to make it clear he’s
not bluffing. The only thing to do is call his bet.

“I guess you know about Watercourse Way then.”

Silence.

“Hank, you there?”

“Yeah, I’m still here.”

“Is that where you’re off to?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, I’ll save you some time. She was there with Forman yesterday.”

“What was she doing there?”

“What do people do there?” she asks.

“Pastorini says either make love or relax.”

She laughs. “I somehow don’t imagine him saying it like that.”

“He didn’t.”

“You’re such a prude, Hank. Maybe they fucked, then relaxed. Did you ever think of that? You can do both, you know?”

“Well, as you might imagine, I’m more interested in the fucking part.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“Did they go back to the house afterwards?”

She takes a breath, hesitates a moment, then says: “As far as I know, she did not take him into the house.”

“Now you’re getting all Bill Clinton on me. What does that mean?”

As she weighs her next response, she sees a car turn off Sand Hill and head down the street toward her. Midsized sedan, generic-looking,
has all the earmarks of a rental.
Got to be him
, she thinks, though she notices there are two people inside the vehicle.

“It means what it means,” she says, giving a little wave to the car’s occupants. “Look, I gotta go. My lunch date is here.”

“I’ll give you till the end of day.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’m bringing her in myself—in cuffs. The media should enjoy that.”

“On what charge?”

“I figured I’d start with obstruction of justice and work my way up.”

“Good luck with that, Hank. Happy hunting.”

As she hangs up, the sedan pulls over and comes to a stop behind her. A petite young woman emerges from the passenger side
and gets out. Then Marty Lowenstein and his trademark shock of frizzy gray hair emerge from the driver’s side. He flashes
a warm, welcoming smile.

“Hello, Ms. Dupuy,” he says. “Thank you for meeting us on such short notice.”

“Pleasure’s all mine, Mr. Lowenstein.”

“Marty,” he says, extending a hand. “Call me Marty.”

L
EAVING THE CARS PARKED WHERE THEY ARE, THEY SET OFF ON FOOT
back to Sand Hill, heading up the pedestrian path a couple hundred yards to the entrance of the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

The young woman’s name is Ashley and she reminds Carolyn a little of Tina Fey. She’s no dead ringer, but change up the glasses
and Carolyn thinks she’d get a few double takes. Turns out she’s been working up in the city with Forman, who’s been volunteering
the past few weeks at the Exoneration Foundation. At least that solves one mystery: the Lowenstein connection.

When Lowenstein called just before noon, she’d figured he was fishing for information on what Beth was saying. But after dispensing
with the introductions, he quickly asked whether she didn’t mind meeting him at her earliest convenience—preferably later
today or early tomorrow—at the scene of “the accident.” He said he was hoping she could answer a few questions for “background
purposes.”

It was an odd conversation. Despite being abundantly polite and complimentary, in his own peculiar way he seemed to be challenging
her. To what end, she wasn’t quite sure, but it bothered her, and instead of saying she’d get back to him in a little while,
as she’d initially been inclined to do, she ended up pushing to meet earlier. After all, she was nearby, and it behooved her
to try to get a sense of where things stood with Forman. Oh yeah, and she was just a little curious to see him in the flesh.

He turns out to be a little taller than she’d expected. He’s always struck her as someone who’s cultivated his vaunted status
pragmatically
and prudently. He probably could have gotten even more exposure, but her impression is that he’s deliberately avoided becoming
a media slut, knowing that doing so would diminish him. TV builds you up but it can also water you down. Lowenstein seems
to have found a happy medium.

“We saw this driving down,” he says, stopping in front of the faded white cross planted beside the pedestrian path: “I’m always
fascinated by roadside memorials. There’s an immediacy to them even years later.”

He stoops to take a closer look at the memorial. It’s pretty understated—no ribbons, laminated pictures, or wreaths of any
sort. The initials of the accident victim are written on the vertical part of cross and RIP is notched neatly into the wood
horizontally. Lower down, on the front of the cross and on the sides, people have carved short messages in small letters.
Most appear to be from friends or relatives, though could have been written by strangers.

“How did the parents feel about the outcome?” he asks, standing again and talking more loudly so his voice carries over the
sound of passing cars. The traffic along Sand Hill alternates between sporadic and steady; when the light at the intersection
is green, which is most of the time, the cars zip by pretty quickly, probably pushing sixty.

“Outcome of what?” she asks.

“The trial. Richie’s conviction.”

“They were religious people. They’d put their faith in God. So, in that sense, I think they were willing to accept whatever
resolution the court gave them.”

“The victim had a brother and sister?”

“Yes. They were more vocal in their desire for a conviction. They were incredibly angry. They would have been heartbroken
if he’d walked.”

“I think that’s one of the more brilliant things you did, Ms. Dupuy.”

“What?”

“The subtle way you got it into the heads of the jurors that if they didn’t convict Richie Forman, no one would be convicted.
You managed to raise the stakes.”

Damn
, she thinks.
The great Marty thinks you’re brilliant
. She feels her face redden, a smile involuntarily creeping onto her lips. But
then she catches herself:
He’s trying to soften you up. Don’t go mushy
.

“Like you, I pride myself on my rapport with juries,” she says. “You know what I tell people who say they don’t want to serve?
I tell them, ‘Hey, you’re going to want to see me in action. You don’t want to miss this.’ People want theater. They want
to be entertained. That said, the evidence in the Forman case was very solid. The one big unknown was how he’d play on the
stand. Therefore my main focus was to undermine his credibility, even just slightly, because the evidence was so strong. He
actually gave me a little more than I was hoping for.”

“Ashley took a look at that evidence,” Lowenstein says. “It was solid but not overwhelming. There were holes that the defense
failed to exploit fully—or at all.”

“Such as?”

“Mr. McGregor was never examined. His injuries were never documented. The detectives made a few notes about his condition,
but he was never examined by a doctor. And the way the crime scene was processed was lackadaisical. Everybody was under the
assumption that Forman was the driver, so the investigation was tarnished by that assumption.”

Ashley: “It’s also unclear that the injuries sustained by Forman were consistent with someone who was seated in the driver’s
seat.”

Carolyn feels her nostrils flare. This Ashley looks like she’s fresh out of college. “And that’s some sort of great revelation?
I’ve been through all this before. We called our experts. They called theirs. If you want to play Monday-morning quarterback
and tell me you would have got Forman off, go right ahead, but I don’t really have time for that now.”

Lowenstein dismisses her indignation, motions for Ashley to hand over a yellow folder she’s carrying. He takes it and opens
it, leafing through the various pieces of paper until he gets to a set of photos printed out on photographic paper. Most are
eight by tens but a few are five by sevens and four by sixes. He removes them from the folder and hands the folder back to
Ashley.

“I take it you’ve seen these.” Pictures of the accident. He holds one up and glances over it. “This one seems like it was
taken just a few feet from where we’re standing.”

“Where’d you get those?”

“Ashley’s very good. She’s been making some inquiries in her spare time.”

“At whose behest?”

“We were doing a background check on Rick for the foundation and I got curious,” Ashley explains.

“Rick?”

“Yes, Richie goes by Rick now,” she says. “I told him I was looking into his case a bit and he seemed somewhat ambivalent
about it but didn’t object too strenuously. He didn’t think there was much point in it.”

Carolyn has a flashback to handling a similar assortment of photos years ago. “A lot of those are official police photos,”
she says. “How’d you get them?”

Ashley: “I contacted the accident victim’s family and, well, they didn’t want to have anything to do with me. But I had more
luck with the friend, the woman who was in the car and injured in the accident. She lives up in the city.”

“Dawn?” Carolyn says, suddenly remembering her name.

“Yes, Dawn Chu. She’s had a rather rough go of it. I don’t suppose you’ve kept track of her.”

“No. I actually have my own problems, which I’m sure you’re aware of given your apparent crack investigative skills.”

“She works at Centerfolds, over on Broadway.”

Centerfolds
. Sounds familiar, but she can’t remember why. Then it hits her. “The strip club?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?” She pauses briefly to consider how a woman with an advanced physics degree ended up a stripper. “Well, I guess the
only upside is she must be fully recovered physically. I took a pole-dancing class once. That shit is hard.”

“She’s still nearly blind in the one eye,” Ashley says. “And she still has memory issues.”

“And she had the photos?”

“Yes, she’d asked the police for anything they had on the accident. As disturbing as some of the pictures were, she wanted
them. She told me that she had a premonition that someday someone would come asking about the accident.”

“And there you were.”

“There I was.”

“That’s not all,” Lowenstein says. “Apparently, she’s had some contact with Forman.”

“Contact? What kind of contact?”

Lowenstein glances over at Ashley, queuing her to answer. “Well, as part of the settlement, he had to pay restitution,” she
says. “There was a larger settlement of hundreds of thousands but then he was supposed to send a check for one dollar on the
anniversary of the accident for each year of her life.”

“Yeah, I remember that. To the parents.”

“And Dawn. Anyway, she says that along with the check each year, he’d also been sending a note, which wasn’t required. She
showed them to me. He’d always say that on this day, the anniversary, he was thinking about her and her friend and how sorry
he was for what happened. And then he’d write about himself and how he was doing. Some of it was quite personal. You know,
he was sexually assaulted in prison.”

“I’d heard that,” Carolyn says. “And that he’d taken a sharp object to the jugular of one of his attackers. Nearly killed
him. If I were still a prosecutor, I’d—”

Ashley’s eyes narrow, bearing down on her. “How’d you feel about that?”

“About what?”

“That he was assaulted.”

You entitled little bitch
. “What I felt is irrelevant. But to fulfill your curiosity, I felt bad. Mr. Forman’s sentence was heavy enough as it was.
More importantly, did she write back?”

“No. She said a friend advised her not to write back. He said Forman was just trying to suck her in, manipulate her. That’s
what people in prison do.”

“But she saw him after he got out?”

Ashley nods. She explains that Dawn found out Forman was doing these Sinatra gigs, and she went to see him at one. Afterwards,
she saw him up at the bar and introduced herself. But she gave him her stage name, Toni. She had some work done after the
accident, so he didn’t recognize her.

“She has these big fake boobs now,” Ashley goes on. “Wears her hair short and spiky and talks with a Texas accent.”

She told Forman she’d been a Dallas Mavericks cheerleader for a while and that she worked at the club and he should come by
sometime and say hello. A few days later, he dropped a hundred bucks on a lap dance and then she hooked up with him a week
or two later “back at his apartment, free of charge.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Carolyn says, stunned. “And she doesn’t say anything the whole time, doesn’t reveal who she
is?”

“Nope. But she gets him to talk about how he went to prison and how his friend switched seats on him and all that. She seems
to take some weird, perverse pleasure in him not knowing it’s her. Says it was the best sex she ever had.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Carolyn glances over at the cross, then turns and looks out onto the intersection where the accident took place. She can’t
believe what she’s hearing and where she’s hearing it.

She looks over at Lowenstein, who seems to be enjoying her agita. “Why are you telling me all this, Marty?” she asks.

“Did Ms. Hill tell you anything about somebody blackmailing her husband?”

Carolyn almost falls into Lownstein’s trap, but then backs away at the last second.

“So that’s why we’re here, eh? I’m not sure we had to meet by the side of the road if you were interested in discussing my
client’s statements.”

Lowenstein smiles, unruffled. “You’re an insider here, Ms. Dupuy.”

“Carolyn.”

“Yes, sorry. Look, you’re an insider here and I just showed up four hours ago and I’m trying to get my head around a lot of
stuff. I’m looking for a little help. My client is the one locked up at the police station, not yours. But I do get a strong
sense that Ms. Hill is not telling the entire truth about what happened and where she was yesterday.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I’m a fast learner. And by that I mean that I learn things quickly
from people. One of the good things about being a celebrity attorney is that folks are more apt to meet with and talk to you,
even by the side of the road. Because they’ve seen you on TV before, they think they know you, and more importantly, they
have a tendency to be accommodating.”

“Everybody’s a starfucker.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“So you think Dawn was somehow involved in blackmailing McGregor?”

“So you are aware that someone sent a note to McGregor saying they had evidence he was driving the car and wanted two hundred
fifty thousand dollars to keep quiet?”

“Yes, I’m aware of that. I was not aware that she was suspected.”

“She isn’t. Not by the police anyway. But a copy of a photograph apparently was attached to the note.”

“What did the photo show?”

“We’re not sure. The Sunnyvale police aren’t saying. But McGregor seems to have claimed it was altered. Photoshopped.”

“I only knew about him reporting something to the police. I wasn’t aware of the photo, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“And you saw all the photos from the crime scene? Did any bystanders take additional pictures? Or police officers or firefighters?
I know the technology wasn’t what it is today, but most cell phones had cameras back then.”

“If you’re asking whether any photos were suppressed, the answer’s a definitive no. We may be inept by your standards, but
we’re not corrupt.”

“I didn’t say anything about ineptitude.” He turns around and points up to the traffic light. “So these lights didn’t have
any cameras in them at the time of accident?”

“They still don’t. Well, not the kind that would have helped document what happened. They have something in there that measures
the speed of passing cars. That’s it.”

“And the Linear Accelerator had no video?”

She looks over at the guard station, a good fifty yards away up an inclined driveway. While they’re standing next to the turnoff
to the Accelerator, the guard station—and real entrance—is up the hill a bit,
away from the road. The cluster of office buildings is even further up the hill, well beyond the guard station.

“They had video of the guard station—and the cars going in and out—but the camera back then didn’t go all the way down to
the road. I believe it does now. Someone’s probably watching us, wondering what the hell we’re doing here.”