Lion Plays Rough, page 13
“Come on. It’s not that I wasn’t ready this time. From the start you knew that Scarsdale was a loser and you dumped him on me.”
“If you’d been ready, you would have seen it for the loser it was and pleaded him out in five minutes. I wasn’t getting anywhere with him. I thought maybe you could, and then you let him go to trial with a case you couldn’t win. Better, at least, to make that mistake like this, with someone who’s guilty.”
“Well, he was guilty, all right. We both know I did everything I could have done.”
“There’s always something you could do better. The minute you start thinking, ‘Oh well, he was guilty anyway,’ you’re done.”
“Sure,” I said. I knew she was playing with me, trying to make like she’d set me up for some kind of a test that I’d failed. We both knew it wasn’t that simple, but she was the boss—and that made me the one left standing when the music stopped.
~ ~ ~
With Car working on Campbell and his open cases, I decided to find out what I could about Lavinia Perry. It was easy to confirm the basics: in five minutes I had a printout listing all of her addresses for the last twenty years, her debt history, her employers, even her fishing license; I was able to confirm that she was married to Detective Campbell and that they hadn’t divorced. There was a long list of cases in which she’d appeared as a testifying witness, and a civil lawsuit filed against her in federal court. But it had been thrown out without her having to give any testimony, a run-of-the-mill problem for any urban cop.
I decided to pay a visit to Nikki Matson.
Her office was in a rehabbed Victorian not far from the courthouse. It looked like she rented out the bottom floor, which had shabby curtains on the windows and a side porch full of junk. Across the street was a liquor store. An unmarked car sat double-parked as if watching the place.
The front door opened directly into a reception room. Nikki’s secretary was a wizened black woman. An oxygen tank stood on a dolly beside her chair, the mask and hoses draped over the handles.
“I don’t have an appointment, but I was hoping to see Nikki.”
“You don’t have . . .” she began, then began to cough—a dry metallic sound.
I came around the desk and helped her adjust the mask, tucking in bits of her stiff, white hair. Then I turned the cock of the oxygen tank as she sucked.
“I can’t let you in without an appointment,” she finally said.
“I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you don’t seem to be in any condition to be working.”
“You call this work, all the hoodlums that come through here?” She took the mask from my hand. Then in a low voice, “I’ll let the bitch know you’re here. What name should I say?”
“Leo Maxwell.”
“She isn’t taking new clients, and she doesn’t pay referral fees. Just so you know.”
She got to her feet, holding on to her mask until the last second as she swayed away like a swimmer clinging to a rope. Then she went with short, quick steps across the reception area and through a door, activating the lock with a key fob she wore on a rubber band around her wrist.
I began to worry as soon as she was gone. There might have been another fifteen feet of hallway on the other side of that door before she reached her destination.
Just as I was getting ready to call someone she came back with a sheet of yellow notepaper in hand.
“She won’t see me?”
“Yeah, she won’t see you. She’s in there with that client.”
I felt myself go stiff, a film of sweat breaking out on my brow. “Damon.”
“That’s the one. You know what she calls him? A community activist.” She dropped into her chair and jammed the oxygen mask over her nose again.
I came around the desk and rested my hand on the cock of the tank, then gave it an extra half turn. She looked up at me, her eyes startled but not censorious. “It won’t last,” she said in a whisper, her eyes locked with mine. I took my hand from the valve but she didn’t turn it back to its previous level. She just sat there breathing. After a moment I gave it another half turn, and she drank it in, an actual, real breath for the first time since I’d come in, tears filming her eyes.
“He’s got a man inside, in Santa Rita,” I whispered. “Probably another client of hers. I figure she’s the one who carried the message. I want his name.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know nothing.”
I stared hard at her, then twisted the valve, cutting off the flow of oxygen. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Her face grew more and more ashen as she strained to withhold the cough, but at last it tore itself from her. Now she stared hard back at me as her fingers scrabbled for the valve.
“Someone who was in last week, someone she went to see when there was no good reason to see him. He murdered my client, Jamil Robinson. Your boss set it up, making her as good as an accomplice. Just give me a name. I’ll keep you out of it. Spell it on the table with your finger if you don’t want to say it aloud.”
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.”
