“From the beginning, you invited me in,” she says, so quietly at first that I can barely hear her. “You had me come to your trials. You practiced your openings and closings on me, ran ideas past me. You brought me to the victory dinners with your colleagues, the political events. Even when we socialized with the other DAs and the cops, we went as a couple. From the start, it was always us. Mick and Piper. I jumped onto your bandwagon, and it became our bandwagon. And on top of that, what we were doing was important. We were fighting the good fight, sending the bad guys away, making the streets safer. And when Gabby came along and we had a child to protect, that made our crusade even more important to me.
“And then, out of the blue, you said you wanted to leave the prosecutor’s office and jump to the other side. I couldn’t believe it when you told me. But I thought, okay, I can do that with you. We’d fight for guys like Tommy. Good people who’d done some bad things. People who just needed a second chance. And then you joined up with Lou Mastardi,” she says of the partner who’d formed the firm Susan and I inherited. “And that was the end of it—of all of it—for us. It was the end of us. Our circle of friends excluded us. You worked even longer hours than before. When you got home, you were too tired to talk about your cases, let alone ask me what I thought. I went to your trials at first, but it was all I could do to get you to acknowledge me. All my ideas about fighting for worthy defendants . . .” She shakes her head. “I was naive, I know.” Piper pauses. “All that was left of our great mission was your job. Mick and Piper became Mick. Mick in the office, Mick in the courtroom, Mick across the state at some legal seminar. Piper at home, with Gabby.”
Piper stops, looks at me, and I hang my head. Piper isn’t telling me anything that I hadn’t already figured out. Still, to hear her tell it cuts me to the quick.
“I understand why you went to David. I really do. And I have no excuses. Any more than I have for what I’d done to Tommy. But it still hurts to hear it. God, it hurts.” I double over, my arms around my belly. But Piper has already delivered the blows.
After a long while, I sit up, look at Piper. “So what now?” I ask. “Is there a chance? Can we get back to us, or is it over?”
Piper stands. She leaves the room. I sit in the semidarkness, in fear. For all I know, she’s packing her bags. Or calling the police from the kitchen. After what seems like forever, she comes back. In her left hand is another bottle of wine, in her right two fresh glasses. She pours the wine and hands me a glass.
“Us is all I’ve ever wanted, Mick. And us is more imperative now than ever, because of the most important mission of all.”
I smile through my tears. “Gabby.”
Piper nods. “Gabby.”
We raise our classes, clink them, and drink.
And then, with a self-possession that amazes me, Piper returns to her narrative.
“When David got to the hotel, he was in a panic. He told me everything—about Jennifer Yamura, their arrangement. He said he’d gone to the house on Addison Street to give Jennifer something or pick something up, I can’t remember. He told me she was dead, that he’d found her on the cellar stairs. That her blood was everywhere. He said someone had obviously killed her.
“I was furious when I found out I was just part of a larger harem. But I believed him, and I didn’t want his life to be ruined for something he didn’t do. So I decided to help him.” Piper pauses here, and I can tell she’s thinking about out how to finish the story. “So we worked out a plan. David agreed to go back to the house that night, try to clean it all up. Remove his fingerprints. Clear out all of his clothes and belongings. He said there was no way the house could be traced to him.”
I watch Piper closely. Part of her story doesn’t ring true to me. If David “agreed” to go back to Yamura’s house, that means the suggestion had to come from Piper, and I just can’t see her suggesting something like that.
Piper sees me studying her and looks away.
I take a moment to gather my own thoughts. Then I continue recounting my side of the story. How I believed I had killed Jennifer until I received the prosecution’s evidence and learned that she hadn’t died from the fall down the stairs. That she’d crawled away from the steps and been found by someone else, who dragged her back to the stairs and left her to bleed out.
I tell Piper all about Anna Groszek’s blackmail scheme and explain that the reason David was caught flying to Mexico and Grand Cayman was to fetch the money to pay the blackmail. “I didn’t know for sure whether it was David who dragged Jennifer back to the steps until I received the blackmailer’s surveillance tape and saw him entering the house after I left.” I let this last part hang in the air.
Piper nods, her gaze distant. “There was blood on his shirtsleeves. He said he went down the stairs to where she was lying. He said he tried to rouse her, and that’s how he got the blood on him. But he was lying, wasn’t he? He really did kill her. And lied to me afterward.” Piper suddenly looks faint. “Jesus, what are we going to do?”
I reach over and take her hands. “We’re going to finish the plan,” I say. Then I explain who, besides David and me, appears on the videotape. Last, I tell Piper the part she’ll have to play. How she must lie under oath and testify that David was with her at the time of the murder, not afterward.
“But why can’t I just repeat the lie David told me when he came to the hotel about Jennifer being already dead when he found her? The jury would find him not guilty.”
I shake my head. “The jury would hang him. Think about it. David came to the hotel room after Yamura was murdered, admitting that he’d just come from her house. Your testimony would place him at the scene of the murder precisely within the time frame fixed by the medical examiner. And the plan you two worked out to have him go back to the house to clean up the crime scene? That would make you an accessory after the fact.” I pause. “There’s only one way to get us all out of this. One way to make sure that David isn’t convicted so that he never needs to hire appellate counsel or tell them about the video.”
“But so what if he does tell some other lawyers about the video? You only showed him the part with him on it. He has no idea you were in the house before him, that it was you who pushed Jennifer down the steps.”
I explain to Piper that David and his blue-chip appellate team would have no problem finding out who lived in the house behind Yamura’s, and little difficulty tracking down Anna Groszek. Once they found her, they’d pressure her—or, more likely, bribe her—to turn over the original copy of the video. Once they had it, I’d be done for.
“Your alibi testimony ends the trial,” I say. “It’s our only hope.”
Piper sits quietly for a moment, then asks, “What if I hadn’t caved? What if I hadn’t admitted to you that it was me who was with David? What would you have done?”