“I honestly don’t know what you mean.”
“Your client, David Hanson,” she says. “Turns out the house on Addison Street isn’t his only love nest. He has another one, in Manhattan. And there are, like, three Chinese girls living there.”
“Jesus Christ.” I say it before I can stop myself. “No! Wait.”
Patti laughs. “I’d rather just quote your expletive.”
I take a deep breath, try to lower my blood pressure. “Look, I’m sorry. Can you just give me a little more background?”
“Sure. About two weeks ago, we get an anonymous tip that your client’s Philadelphia pied-à-terre is one of a pair. That he has a second house in New York. The caller even gives the address. So we do a little research and find out the house is held in the name of HD Holdings, the first link in a chain of companies ultimately ending with Hanson World Industries. A couple of reporters stake out the building, watch who goes in and out. They see not one but three young women living in the house, all young and Asian and quite beautiful. I’m sure they can’t wait for their lord and master to show up.”
My ears perk up. “So he hasn’t been seen there? At the house?”
“Come on, Mick. A house full of Asian girls? Owned by the same corporate fronts your client used to buy the place in Philly?”
My head is bent low. My eyes closed. I’m rubbing my forehead with my left hand as I hold the receiver with my right. I’m irked at the delight Patti is obviously taking in telling me this. But my ire at the reporter is nothing compared to the rage building inside me at David Hanson. Still, I remind myself I am a professional, with a job to do. And part of that job is damage control. So I give Patti my statement: “Here it is, Patti. This latest story, undoubtedly leaked to the press by the DA’s office, serves only to betray the prosecutor’s mission to sidetrack the public and poison potential jurors with gossip and innuendo in the hopes of distracting everyone from the only real issue in this case: my client’s actual guilt or innocence. It seems that a few sorry members of law enforcement, and the press as well, have forgotten that every citizen is innocent until proven guilty, and that an accused citizen’s right to freedom from wrongful imprisonment isn’t to be stolen from him for the sake of selling a few newspapers.”
“Ouch. Sounds like we hit a nerve.”
“More than one.”
I hang up, then dial David’s cell number. I leave a message, tell him to call as soon as possible. Then I dial his home number. Marcie answers on the second ring. After an awkward pause, I tell her it’s me and ask for David. Marcie informs me he’s not home but should be soon. “I’m going to drive out there,” I say. “Something happened. Is about to happen. There’s going to be another story, about David. I need to talk to him before it comes out. I should talk to you, too.”
Marcie asks me to tell her over the phone. I say I’d rather not. I ask if I can bring Susan.
“The more the merrier.”
I feel awful for Marcie. So much bad has happened in her life in such a short time. The cancer. The radiation and chemo. Then her husband is indicted for murder. Then comes the Philadelphia geisha-house story revealing that David’s been cheating on Marcie for who knows how long. And now it’s about to get even worse. David isn’t just some schmuck who got caught having a fling. He’s something else entirely: a man who keeps women for his enjoyment. Asian women. Marcie will want to kill him. Or herself.
I walk into Susan’s office, tell her what’s happening, and ask her to drive with me to David and Marcie’s house. “I’ll need you there for moral support when I tell Marcie about the place in New York. I’ll also need you there to keep me from strangling David.”
I spend the drive to the Hansons’ thinking about Marcie. I first met her in the Hamptons, where she and some friends had rented a beach house for the summer. David drove me up, told me he’d found a terrific girl and wanted me to meet her. “She’s the only woman I’ve ever met who’s as competitive as I am,” David confided. She was also, it turned out, striking. Tall with long, toned legs, thick raven hair, emerald-green eyes, high cheekbones, and flawless olive skin.
When they were married a couple of years later, I was a groomsman. For several years afterward, David and Marcie and Piper and I often got together for dinner. We even once spent a week vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard. But over time we drifted apart, pulled away from one another by our very different social circles.
The last time I saw Marcie was a few months before David’s arrest, when Piper and I had dinner with Piper’s parents at the country club. We crossed paths in the lobby. Marcie was different from the tanned and smiling athlete I first met in the Hamptons. She was pale. Her once-fit limbs were bone thin. Her ample chest was gone. She had opted against reconstructive surgery after her mastectomy, and her blouse hung limply. She didn’t smile once. I saw in her eyes a look that took me a while to decipher. It wasn’t just pain, though that was certainly present. Rather, Marcie’s eyes broadcast confusion. As though—I decided—she simply could not understand how this could have happened to her, how her body, once a powerhouse of vitality and strength, could betray her, could decide to eat itself alive.
I drive past the large stone columns framing the entrance to a quarter-mile-long cobblestone driveway leading to the front of the Hanson family compound, Blackthorn. The main house is a three-story Victorian Gothic monstrosity constructed of large, coarse limestone with two turrets framing the center entrance and reaching fifteen feet above the roofline, and squatter turrets on each of the building’s four corners. Built in 1915, the house in many ways typifies the notion of luxury held by many turn-of-the-century, self-made American millionaires like Linwood Hanson.
“This place makes me feel cold just looking at it,” Susan says as we walk toward the entrance.
Marcie opens the door before we knock. She doesn’t look anything like the sickly, haunted creature I’d last seen. Her face is pink, her skin supple. Her eyes are bright and alert. And though I try to avoid looking directly at it, her bosom is large. She must have had the reconstructive surgery, after all.
Marcie sees me scrutinizing her and says, “I’m not quite the six-million-dollar woman, but I do feel that I’ve been rebuilt from the ground up.”