Lion Plays Rough, page 18
After a moment I moved closer to the piano, trying to follow her lead. “Did Jeremy ever tell you about seeing something on his way to work in the morning? A shooting?”
“He probably would have figured that was one of the things I didn’t need to know.”
“Did Campbell or anyone else ever look through those boxes?”
“No.”
“So you never heard of a Sgt. Lucas?” Jeremy’s case hadn’t gone to trial; Mrs. Walker hadn’t been present at the suppression hearing, and so would have had no occasion then to learn the name of the detective who’d arrested her son.
“Don’t know why I should. I don’t have doings with the police myself.”
“How about Lavinia Perry?”
She lifted her hands and the music stopped. From the other room came Teddy’s loud groan. My cheeks heated again, but the look on Mrs. Walker’s face was far away, her abstraction genuine. “Why, I just dreamed about that child. It’s so odd that you would mention her name now, after all these years. She was the first one, the girl my Jeremy wanted to marry. This was back when they were in high school. He broke her heart.”
~ ~ ~
“I’ve never been so embarrassed,” I said to Teddy on the bus on the way home.
He didn’t respond. It was loud. Maybe he didn’t hear. We were surrounded by a bunch of kids heading home from Skyline High. My head was pounding.
“You can’t just do that.” I’d known that sexual inappropriateness could be a symptom of brain damage, but this was the first I’d seen of it.
Teddy was looking out the window. He resembled nothing so much as a kid who’d just eaten too much candy, and was both satisfied with himself and about to be sick.
I tried again. “Look, you can’t have sex with a girl who doesn’t know who you are from one moment to the next. I’m talking as your lawyer here. I don’t even think Tamara is legally capable of giving her consent.”
“Oh, she consented. I’ve never seen consent like that.”
“The walls are thin. The woman’s seventy years old.”
Teddy didn’t have anything to say to that, but I knew what he could have said—that he was only taking what was offered, and that Mrs. Walker wasn’t going to accuse him of anything. When we were leaving, she’d said, “We’ll see you on Sunday. We leave for chuch at nine am.”
“Okay,” Teddy had told her. I knew then that the bargain was sealed, and that Mrs. Walker would make sure Teddy lived up to his end.
“She thinks you’re going to marry her daughter-in-law,” I told him. “She’s old school. That’s what it means to traditional people when you go to bed with a girl. She thinks you’re going to take Tamara off her hands.”
His face went through a series of contortions. Finally he said. “I don’t have a problem with that.”
“You do whatever you want to do.” I turned to the window. It seemed to me that I’d been teetering on the edge of exhaustion for a long time, ever since Teddy was shot, and now I was sliding over the edge. I didn’t have the energy to do anything but lay my head against the grimy seat back and watch the streets slide by. My life was veering out of control, or rather I’d never had it under control. I’d been like a child making believe that I could steer the vehicle I was riding in. A city bus. Goddamn it.
At home there was a message from Jeanie, asking when I’d be back at work. There was a hearing coming up in one of the DUIs she’d dropped on my desk. She was right, I realized. It was high time that I stopped worrying about dead clients and started paying attention to the live ones, while I still had the chance.
Chapter 24
I sat at my desk and turned on my computer with the relief of a drunk in sight of home and free to collapse. This was an illusion, of course. There was still a rogue ex-cop out there who wanted to kill me, and a woman who wanted Teddy, who was dependent on me, to marry her brain-damaged daughter-in-law. My desk was heaped with files, my inbox choked with e-mails, the message indicator on my phone blinking a staccato pulse. Yet here at least a semblance of control was possible: all it took was sitting at my desk until the work was done.
I kept the door closed. I didn’t want to be disturbed. I went through the cases one by one, checking the court’s orders against my calendar, making sure that all the dates were noted correctly. Then I wrote brief memos to file, summarizing the status of the case, what had been done and what remained, the investigation that needed to be conducted, the names of witnesses, holes that I’d previously spotted in the DA’s evidence.
I was tired of criminal law. Lord, was I tired of it. Was it too much to ask to be able to sleep at night, safe in my bed and secure in my conscience?
Before Jeanie left she knocked on my door. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Let’s talk. Tomorrow. Tonight I’m too pooped.”
“I’m going to pull a late night, but I should be here by eight thirty, tops.”
She seemed about to give me some warning, then just nodded and went out, pulling the door closed even though I was the last one left in the office.
She was going to get rid of me, I figured. I didn’t blame her and I didn’t blame myself. I’d done what I’d had to do, what it seemed to me was my duty toward my clients. It was just that death had stayed one step ahead.
~ ~ ~
By midnight I had the cases in a state where another lawyer could easily take them over if Jeanie decided to fire me, if Lucas succeeded in killing me, or if I decided that it was time to walk away and start over, buy a motorcycle and take a trip down through Mexico and South America like I used to fantasize about. Or maybe do it on a bicycle, see how it felt to be in the kind of shape where you can pedal all day and not be tired, eat two dinners, rise in the morning, and do it again.
I’d given up work and was looking on Craigslist for a used motorcycle, plotting the route I would take down through Baja California. I had my feet up on the desk and I was drinking a beer from the office fridge. The ringing of my phone broke a silence that seemed to have gone on longer than I’d lived.
I was surprised to hear Car’s voice. “I thought you didn’t go into the office anymore,” he said. “I called your place, but Teddy said you were out.”
“You know about motorcycles?”
“You thinking about buying one?”
“Maybe.”
“Funny thing. A man seriously considers buying a bike, then doesn’t go through with it, he won’t ever again be the man he was before the idea came into his head. It diminishes a person to think about himself on a motorcycle and then say no. Afterward he’ll always have that question in the back of his mind, that what if. It’s like corrosion on the soul.”
“You got a bike?”
“I don’t need to put a thing like that between my legs to prove I’m a man.”
“So it’s damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”
“I’m just saying, if you don’t feel masculine enough, motorcycle’s a pretty good purchase.”
“Why you calling me, Car?”
“Little update on what we talked about the other night.”
“Talk to Teddy about Teddy. It’s none of my business where he lives.”
“The other thing. Your little problem. I had another talk with my guy in the Oakland PD. He called me, actually. Seems there’s an addendum to that dirty laundry he wasn’t supposed to be airing. So I twist his arm again, and he tells me that your friend Sgt. Perry hasn’t shown up for her shifts the last three days. They sent someone to her house. She wasn’t there. Official line is she’s taking an unscheduled leave, but if she comes back they’re going to fire her ass.”
“If she comes back?”
“Let’s just say that he expressed a certain skepticism of the official line.”
“Shit.” I remembered the pictures of Nikki Matson. The thought of Lavinia having been dealt with in similar fashion was unbearable.
“You think something happened to her?” Car asked.
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
“She was into something, and Campbell was into her. Isn’t that what you think? So now she’s gone. Adios. Down to Mexico.”
“Find her,” I said. “Can’t you find her? Can you do that?”
“I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I even would want to.”
“You want to,” I told him. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have called.”
“I want to get paid, is what I want. How do I get paid on this? There’s no case.”
“When I get paid you get paid.”
“You need a case to get paid. There’s no case. Where’s the client?”
“Jeremy was gunned down in cold blood to keep him from telling anyone he saw Lucas orchestrating an assault by a bunch of thugs in broad daylight on a drug dealer’s house. How’s that for a case?”
“What, like a civil case?” The spirit seemed to drain from his voice.
“Sure. Wrongful death. Civil rights.” Why go on defending criminals, I thought, when I could make a contingency fee working for the truth rather than against it. “She’s definitely a witness. Call it our precomplaint investigation.”
“You got a client for this complaint you’re going to file?”
“I got my dead client’s mother. And Jeremy’s widow. You find Sgt. Perry, we meet with her, get her to talk to us, convince her to give us a statement.”
“I get paid up front.”
“Then don’t take the job. You’ve got your pick. You don’t have to work for me.”
A pause. “I’ll put a couple of hours into it. If I don’t find her, I don’t find her. I’m not going to spend a whole week on this. Someone like her, a cop, she ought to know how to stay hidden. And if she doesn’t, well, I’m not going to lie to you. There’s probably someone out there who wants to find her more than me.”
“You’ll find her.”
Chapter 25
With Jeremy’s handwritten statement in hand, I decided that I finally had enough information to merit an approach to Campbell. In the morning I called the police department and left a message on his voice mail, telling him I wanted to speak with him regarding Jeremy Walker. “I’m mystified,” he said when he called me back. “Unless you’re calling to talk about Nikki Matson, I don’t think we’ve got any business.”
“Kristofferson showed me the pictures,” I said. “The person who cut Nikki up would have come out of there with so much blood on him you’d have found it behind his ears. He’s probably still got it on him.”
“Then I guess we don’t have business.”
“Jeremy Walker was my client. I know Chris Lucas killed him, and I think I can help you prove it. Just hear me out; that’s all I’m asking.”
Campbell paused so long that I thought he’d hung up. Finally he said, “I’ll be at your office in five minutes. We’ll drive.”
I was waiting on the curb. Campbell leaned across to open the passenger door but didn’t say anything. I had no proof he was an honest cop, as Peabo had said, but I got in beside him. For all I knew, Campbell might have killed Nikki. I’d come to think there must be an innocent explanation for his meetings with Damon, or at least one that didn’t involve a conspiracy to frame Jamil and have him murdered in jail. Still, I wouldn’t have bet my life on it.
We didn’t speak for a minute as he worked his way through traffic. Then Campbell seemed to choose his words carefully. “So do you know something connecting Chris Lucas and Jeremy Walker or is that just a shot in the dark?”
“Not as much as the U.S. attorney knows. What about you?”
“Oh, I know Chris real well.”
“When I was in jail I met a guy who knew you. Guy by the name of Peabo. One of Damon’s men. He seemed to think you were just about the last honest cop in Oakland. And that got me thinking maybe we’ve both been fooled.”
“My wife asked you to take those pictures, didn’t she?”
“She told me she was Jamil Robinson’s sister, and you and Damon were trying to frame him for murder. Then I got a call from someone pretending to be Jamil. I figure that was Lucas.”
He sighed. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Week and a half ago. I went out and found her during one of her evening shifts with the vice squad. The next day, she came by my place. We drove to the Berkeley Pier, had a chat.”
Campbell was heading up into the hills where he’d met Damon, where I’d taken the pictures. He drove without glancing around and wasn’t interested, it seemed, in the proof I’d discovered, supposedly the point of our conversation. If I were wrong about him, if he were dirty, I’d find out soon enough. If that moment came, I needed to be ready.
I didn’t actually know that the feds were investigating Lucas, whom I’d never met. Maybe I’d been right the first time, and the meeting I’d photographed was precisely what I and the city’s white power structure had assumed, a criminal conspiracy. Maybe Campbell was some rogue cop trying to seize control of the city’s drug trade. Every fact I’d discovered certainly fit that conclusion.
If so, the only way to save myself was to dive out of the car, roll, and come up running.
Campbell turned into the lot beneath the trees and parked. There were no other cars. “Let’s walk. You go ahead of me. Up the trail. You know the way.”
“What are you going to do? Shoot me in the back?” I tried to make it a joke—but it didn’t come out that way.
“I need some air; that’s all. Need to exercise my legs. I got to think how to play this, and when I think, I got to move. And until I’ve thought this through I’m not letting you out of sight.”
I went up the trail ahead of him. Despite Jeremy’s connection to Campbell’s wife, and her connection to Lucas’s scheme, Campbell hadn’t removed himself from the investigation. Maybe he didn’t trust anyone else to care about murdered drug dealers and police corruption, or maybe he wanted to leave a way out for Lavinia and for himself. Again I had the sense of a man pulled in conflicting directions by unwholesome pressures, destined to snap in the direction of whatever force yanked the strongest.
After ten minutes of steady climbing we came out onto the ridge trail. “That view,” Campbell said.
I wasn’t interested in the view.
“Now why don’t you tell me what you were so eager to tell me,” he proposed.
“It wasn’t about money, not at the beginning,” I said, still breathing hard from the climb, sweating in the warm sun, feeling that everything depended on showing him that I understood his intentions. “Not for you. It was about sharing information, letting Damon’s crew do what the police couldn’t do because of people like me, lawyers looking over your shoulders.”
He stood facing me, a few feet of trail between us, surrounded by the silence of the wind and the birds in the trees. “You’re gunning to bring me down.”
I shook my head. “Then someone decided that the cops who tipped off Damon’s crew should share the take. Lucas was probably the one who came up with the idea of putting the drugs back on the street. By then you were out. And ever since then you’ve been trying to stop them.”
“You seem to have all the answers. Doesn’t sound like you’ve got proof.”
“I’ve got this statement Jeremy Walker wrote.” I took out a photocopy of what I’d found. After reading it he folded it carefully and put it in his pocket.
“I suppose you told someone you were meeting me.”
I felt another wave of fear so palpable that he must have seen it. “You’re no killer.”
His nostril twitched. “People surprise themselves. And others.”
“I know that you’re not completely clean in all this, but I also know you got out before it became mercenary.”
“You said you last saw my wife a week and a half ago. That’s a lie. I’m not a violent man but I swear by god I’m not a cop right now.” He enunciated each word separately. “Tell me where she is.”
“If I knew I would tell you.”
He studied me. “No, I don’t think you would. But I could make you tell me. I know the ways, Leo. I could leave you without a scratch on you, not a bruise. Or if it went too far, I could make sure they never find you. I could put you in a place you’d never get out of. Last weekend was just a taste.”
Fear clawed at me. My collar was damp, my eyes misted. I knew by the look in his eyes that he was right, that he could make me tell anything, make me say anything. “She used me, but that doesn’t mean she trusted me. She could be running. Either with Lucas, or from him. Or from the police.”
“Do you even know that she’s alive?”
“My investigator’s looking for her.”
“And what then, if he finds her?”
“I want to try to bring her in, sit her down, get a statement. Lucas ought to pay for Jeremy’s murder. The city ought to pay. But even if I didn’t represent the family, I’ve got to find this guy. Because sooner or later he’s going to come after me.”
“That’s right,” Campbell said. “You’re the man who knew too much.”
He stood poised for—something. I could almost believe that he might have murdered Nikki and tried to kill me, except I couldn’t imagine him using a knife.
Then his limbs loosened, and the crisis passed, and he moved to a bench beside the trail and sat down on it. He looked exhausted, as if he’d aged thirty years since I’d last seen him here. “They found her car a block and a half from her condo, not in a place where she’d ever park it. Like someone left it there.”
“Which one, the Bronco?”
“She’s only got the one car.” He looked up at me.
“When I met her she was driving a blue Pontiac convertible.” I explained how she’d knocked me off the road—deliberately, it seemed.
