David smiles. “Most of the credit belongs to Marcie. She’s quite the strategist, it turns out.”
“Jesus, David. Don’t you realize if the reporters dig deep enough, they’ll eventually find something that leads them to the truth? If it comes out that the brownstone was originally a fuck pad after all, and that your three musicians are merely part of a massive cover-up, you might as well go ahead and stick the needle in your own arm.”
David’s no longer smiling. “That’s why it’s important to get that apology from the Inquirer and close out the defamation suit as soon as possible. Once the threat of a lawsuit is removed, the paper will lose its will to dig up new information to defend itself.”
“You’ve thought this all out, have you?”
“Figuring out how to extricate myself from this clusterfuck is pretty much all I think about.”
David and I face off for a long moment, before I say, “No more tricks. Not without running it by me first.”
Fury flashes across David’s eyes. But he quells it quickly and blesses me with a broad smile. Then he crosses his heart, winks, and walks away.
An hour later, I’m back in the office. It’s just after noon, and the details of the hearing are all over the midday news shows. The TV reporters, happy to feast on their own, cap their recounts with the fact that I have brought a civil defamation suit against the Inquirer and reporter Patti Cassidy, who is shown fast-walking away from the Criminal Justice Center after the hearing.
“Now she knows how it feels,” Vaughn says as we watch the story on the big flat screen in my office. “Where’s Susan?”
Angie and I share a glance. “Lunch.”
When I originally told Susan about the plan to bring in the phony witnesses, she fought me on the petition. After I decided to move ahead with it anyway, she refused to accompany me to the hearing. When I told her afterward that Marcie and David had leaked the story themselves, she blew up.
“This isn’t ethical! You’re helping David and Marcie perpetrate a fraud on the public. Worse yet, you personally misled the court.”
“I didn’t say anything that was untrue,” I argued. “I simply filed a petition stating that a story averse to my client’s right to a fair trial had been leaked and asked for a gag order. I made no representations myself.”
Before she left my office, Susan stopped and told me, “For some reason, you’ve decided to let David and Marcie lead you down the primrose path. You can do whatever you want. Just understand, I will not walk that road with you. I’m not going to cochair this case unless you agree to play it straight. I’m not losing my ticket for anyone, let alone David Hanson and that scheming wife of his.” Susan pivoted back toward the doorway and saw Angie standing there. “I’m taking an early lunch,” she said as she stormed out of the office.
Now, watching the news with Vaughn and Angie, my discomfort over Susan’s rebuke and my anger at David have dissipated. I am flush with victory and feeling grand.
“How about the three of us go to lunch?” I ask. “Celebrate the win.”
Two hours later, Vaughn, Angie, and I return to the office, stuffed from our meals and lightheaded from our drinks. I putter around my office, open my snail mail, respond to congratulatory e-mails from some fellow defense attorneys who happened to catch the midday news.
It’s just before five, and I’m about to log off my computer when Angie walks in and hands me a padded envelope.
“I forgot to give you this,” she says. “Katrina gave it to me when we came back from lunch. She said an old lady dropped it off, claimed it was personal and confidential, for your eyes only.”
“Let me guess,” I say. “My son’s in jail, and here’s the evidence that proves he didn’t do it.”
“See you tomorrow,” Angie says, and walks out.
I hold the envelope in my hand for a minute, wondering whether I should toss it in the trash or go through the pointless step of watching it first. I’m about to leave anyway, so I think, Why not? I tear open the envelope. Inside are an envelope and a DVD. I put the DVD into my computer, and a video appears on the screen. I recognize the scene. It’s Jennifer Yamura’s backyard and the back of her house. There’s a date on the video screen: May 31 of this year. The day of Jennifer Yamura’s murder.
Oh, Christ.
I quickly stop the video, get up, close the door to my office, then sit back down and restart it. A figure appears on the screen at time stamp 11:50 a.m. A man. He appears in the alley on the left of the screen, from the east. He walks directly to Jennifer Yamura’s kitchen door, knocks. Jennifer appears after a few seconds, opens the door for him. Before the man enters, he looks back, and I see his face.
I am thunderstruck.
By the time the video finishes, I am shaking. It’s all I can do to keep from throwing up. I get off my chair, pace the office. This is a disaster. The atomic bomb.
What the fuck am I going to do?
“Think,” I tell myself. Then I spy the envelope on my desk and reach for it. There’s a piece of paper inside. A single sentence is scrawled:
I will contact you soon.
I realize it instantly: blackmail. That’s how this is going to play out. I sit down at my desk and replay the video. I understand now. A lot of things that didn’t add up before about Yamura’s death now make perfect sense.
I secure the DVD in my office safe. I move to my desk, stand beside it. I lean over, my hand clutching the corner of the desk. I take deep breaths until my heart slows. Then I sit down, pull my wastebasket out from under my desk, and throw up. When I’m finished, I turn my chair around and face the window. I think back to my mother’s death in our kitchen, how I envisioned myself flying out the window to escape the grief that had dragged my father to the floor. I recall my father’s funeral, and how I mentally sequestered myself by fleeing to another burial, a stranger’s casket on the other side of the graveyard. The two most horrific episodes of my life, and I found a way to remove myself from the pain that racked everyone else. Looking out my twentieth-floor window now, I see City Hall and, past it, the streets and buildings below Broad, leading eastward to the Delaware. I wish more than anything that I could fly where my eyes and my mind are taking me now—into New Jersey and across it, to the Atlantic Ocean beyond.
Instead, I stay at the office late into the night, mentally navigating the maze, trying to figure a way out of this for David Hanson, for everyone who matters to me. When I’m finished, I realize there is only one path to safety, a perilous route where the decisions to take the final, essential turns will have to be left up to others. A journey whose first step must be taken by someone else: David Hanson. Whatever amount the blackmailer demands, David Hanson must—absolutely must—pay it. Or all is lost.
I wonder what David will say to me when I show him the video. Will he invent some story to exonerate himself? Or will he break and admit the truth?
16