“My God.” Someone from the police or DA’s office has leaked to the newspaper the fact that David, through Hanson World Industries, owns the house in which Jennifer had been living. The theme of the article was that David had been keeping Jennifer in the house as his mistress, “like an old-fashioned geisha girl.”
“This is so wrong,” Vaughn says as I read. “The fact that Jennifer’s ancestry was Japanese? That geisha thing? It’s racist.”
I sigh and look up at Vaughn. “More to the point is the fact that it makes David look like he’s also a racist. And an elitist.”
“And a pig,” adds Susan, walking into my office, her own copy of the Daily News under her arm.
“Why didn’t he tell us this?” Vaughn asks.
“Maybe for the same reason he won’t tell us where he really was when Yamura was murdered,” says Susan.
“You think he’s guilty?” Vaughn asks.
“I think he has a lot to answer for,” she says. “Like why he’s out chasing other women while the mother of his two children is fighting cancer.”
Susan and Vaughn leave me to read the article, which details the juicy family scandal from which David Hanson sprang. When Edwin was eighteen, their father divorced Edwin’s mother to marry his secretary, who was then pregnant with David. It was a bitter and public divorce and caused Edwin to hate both his father and his younger half brother.
The phone on my desk buzzes behind me. It’s Angie, telling me that David has arrived. I ask her to have Susan and Vaughn meet me in the conference room, and I walk down the hall to meet David in our foyer. We shake hands perfunctorily, and I lead David into the conference room, where we both sit down.
As livid as I am with David, I promise myself not to lose my cool. David is, after all, a client. And for things to work out, it is imperative that he remain so. The last thing I want is for David to fire me in a fit of anger because I can’t hold my tongue.
I take a deep breath, then begin. “David, the reason I’ve asked you to come and meet with us today—”
David cuts me off midsentence. He, apparently, has not resolved to keep his cool with me. “I know why I’m here, Mick. Okay? You’re pissed about the house thing. I should have told you about it. I fucked up. I get it.”
It’s Susan’s turn to interrupt. “Did you see the story in the Daily News this morning?”
David whips his head toward Susan. “Yeah, I did. And so did my brother, who spent forty-five minutes reaming me out over the phone as I drove here this morning. He’s already taken away my job. Had my security card revoked so I can’t even get into the fucking building. Now he’s demanding that I give him my proxy to vote my shares so I won’t have any voice whatsoever in how the company is run. What’s he going to ask for next? My balls on a silver platter?”
I pause a moment to let David see that I’m hearing him. I’m about to say something to calm him down, but Susan just can’t hold back. “What’s with the kimonos?” she demands. One of the things mentioned in the news article was that the police found seven silk Japanese kimonos in Jennifer Yamura’s closet, a fact the reporter used to play up the geisha angle.
“Jesus fuck,” David says. “It was a joke between the two of us. I came in one time and Jennifer was dressed in a kimono, and she pretended, pretended, like she was a geisha and I was her lord, or something. It was role-playing. That’s all. After that, whenever I went to Japan on a business trip, I would come back with a kimono and give it to her. But she never wore them. That one time was the only time.” David shakes his head, plainly both exasperated and exhausted.
“All right,” I say before Susan has a chance to attack again. “I know you’re under a great deal of stress right now,” I begin. I pour a cup of coffee for David and then one for myself from the silver coffee service that Angie has set up on the conference table. Vaughn grabs a couple of croissants. Susan broods. “It’s not our intent to add to it. We just want to make sure there will be no more surprises. We can deal with things, if we know about them. Put our own spin on the facts. But if the first time your legal team finds out about something that’s potentially damaging is when we read it in the newspapers or see it on TV, then it’s too late.”
David looks at me. “All right. I get it.”
“Is there anything else?” I ask. “Anything that might look bad if it comes out?”
David looks up at the ceiling and inhales. He’s thinking. It looks like he’s about to shrug his shoulders when Vaughn says, “The kimonos.” David looks over at Vaughn, who continues. “You said there were seven of them. The first one, the one Jennifer already had and wore as a joke. And the other six you purchased when you went to Japan?”
“Yes?”
“How often did you go to Japan?” This is Susan, who has apparently figured out where Vaughn is going.
A light goes off in David’s eyes, and he stiffens. I can see that he, too, gets it. “I go to Asia, including Japan, about twice a year.” He directs his next comment to me. “I’d actually been seeing Jennifer for almost three years. Not just a handful of times, like I told you.”
“And the house?” I asked. “When did you buy it?”
“I already owned it by then. I’d bought it for . . . someone else. Then she relocated and the house was sitting empty. After a while, I started seeing Jennifer, and eventually, I told her she could move in.”
So Tommy was right when he speculated that David hadn’t purchased the house for Jennifer, but the other way around. I look from Susan to David, who stares down at the table.
“So,” says Susan, “playing devil’s advocate here, when your case goes to trial, the prosecutor will be able to say that you purchased the house to keep one woman, and then after you broke up, you went out and acquired another woman to keep in the same house. Even before your wife got sick and things became stressful between the two of you.”
David says nothing, still averting his eyes.
I take a deep breath, forge ahead. “Your alibi for when Jennifer Yamura was killed. Is there anything you want to add to what you already told us?”
“Anything different?” clarifies Susan.
David ignores Susan and looks directly at me. “I didn’t go to the house the day Jennifer was killed. I only went there that night.”
“Where—” Vaughn gets the one word out before David stands abruptly.
“We’re done here,” he says, then turns to leave.
“Sooner or later, you’re going to want to tell us where you really were, what you were doing,” Susan says to David’s back.
David turns. “Am I, Susan? Am I going to want to tell you? Are you really going to want to know where I was and what I was doing?” This last remark he directs at me. Then he’s gone.
Vaughn is the first to speak. “Did he just tell us he did it? Did he just say that we really don’t want to know where he was when Jennifer was murdered because the answer is he was right there, tossing her down the stairs?”
“That’s not what I heard,” I say. “And it’s not what you heard, either. Got it?” I turn to Susan. “You seem to have quite a hard-on for the man.”