The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Read online

  “It’s work? Is it Oatberger?”

  “Yes. No. But I’m not supposed to say anything about it, and I promised I wouldn’t. I don’t even know if I’m going to go through with what this...person...is proposing.” Although I probably will.

  “You probably will. I know how broke you are.” Daniel had helped me shop for all the licensed Spider-Man merchandise Petey had wanted for Christmas.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do. Why won’t you let me give you a little something? Just to—”

  “No.”

  “Rita. I saw you washing your own car when I drove by last week. That pitiful little bucket and sponge.”

  “So what?”

  “I was late for work or I would have stopped. You’re not supposed to wash your own car, you’re supposed to take it to the car wash.”

  “I’m broke!”

  “Then let me give you—”

  “No. Thank. You.” I tossed the dishrag. “Please don’t make me explain it again.”

  “All right, sweets,” he soothed, “it’s all right. You run along and I’ll take the boy to the park. We’ll show those bad guys how Spider-Man climbs trees.”

  “Be careful. Yesterday at the library he almost gave me an aneurism when he figured out how to—”

  “Stop being such a mom. Petey’s almost a better climber than I am now. He’s fearless.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Chapter 5 – Gary Kwan’s Offer

  My blood quivered in my ears as I parked the Honda and walked around to the front of Gary Kwan’s office building. What was I getting myself into? But I felt fresh and slim and nicely dressed in my black capris and driving moccasins and the sun was out so what the hell’s there, really, to be anxious about? Besides, a thousand dollars a day!

  Gary was right at the doors, holding one open for me, his face calm and friendly. “I’m so glad to see you, Rita.”

  As soon as I stepped into the fresh-smelling lobby, I relaxed. The place was deserted, but I didn’t get a bad vibe. “Thanks and ditto, Gary.” Panels of pink and brown granite lined the lobby, alternating wide stripes like heavy candy.

  We took the elevator to the seventh floor. On the ride up I enjoyed the feeling of anticipation that had been gathering inside me since yesterday—an encounter with an interesting stranger, a tantalizing offer. And it appeared Gary was looking forward to doing some vigorous talking. I could tell by the way he bobbed his head ever so slightly, almost invisibly but constantly, which betrays agreeable excitement.

  Gary’s suite, to my surprise, was small, verging on cramped. Its furniture, meager and cheap, placed it solidly in the start-up tradition. After we passed through the reception foyer, which doubled as a storage closet for supplies, there were doors to three offices. We went into the one with Gary’s name on it.

  “We work seven days a week during trials and as you know, we’ve got one coming up. We’re in jury selection now. But I told everybody to stay away today.”

  He indicated a white metal chair for me at a bitsy white plastic conference table. He joined me after retrieving two cold bottles of brand-X drinking water from a small refrigerator. Behind him, the window overlooked downtown and the suburbs beyond.

  “I’d have expected you to have an ocean view,” I commented.

  “Too distracting, too pretty.”

  “I see.”

  “You were expecting something posh like in a movie.”

  “Yes.”

  “Welcome to my world. I make good money, but when you’re a defense lawyer, you never know where your next case will come from. Or when. It’s not as if you build much repeat business.” Even so, exuberant California light washed the room. Such direct desert light can be hard and unfriendly outdoors when it’s flaring right on you—so unrelenting, so UV—but this way, through the windows, shaded by a sort of cantilever above, it felt benevolent. On my side.

  Gary sat opposite me in a college-coach posture, knees spread, elbows down. Very much at ease. On the table was a stack of files in contract-length folders next to a laptop PC, its screen blank.

  “All right,” he said, smiling eagerly. “What are you wondering about?”

  Instantly I understood the harmonious feeling between us: We were both acute observers of other people. Sensitive to the little dishonesties people allow themselves, then eventually adopt as habits. We saw through those things, which was why we were both good at what we did.

  “Well,” I said, “first I’d like to know more about Eileen Tenaway. What does she say really happened?”

  “What she told the police. She figures she must have been drugged somehow while she was sleeping, then somebody robbed the house. She doesn’t know how.”

  “Well, by whom?” I broke the seal of my water and sipped some. The cold flowed down to my belly.

  “She’s never speculated on that, but I have some ideas.”

  “You have some ideas?”

  “I’m working hard here. She is not an easy client.”

  I thought about that. “Well, when I read about it I wondered why the DA’s charging her with murder instead of, like, negligence or something.”

  “Prosecutors always go for a heavier charge, both for the publicity and to give themselves leeway. They might offer a plea deal, but they also figure, hey, maybe we’ll get lucky and the jury’ll swallow our case whole. If Eileen had said it was an accident—that she gave the baby a couple of pills just to make her sleep—and thrown herself on the mercy of the court, I doubt they’d have charged her with murder. They did offer us a plea, as a matter of fact, but we’re not taking it. She wants to fight.”

  “But they’re not going for the death penalty?”

  “No, they think their chances will be better without it.”

  I was starting to see that my own perception of Eileen Tenaway was based on nothing but shallow sensationalism. Gary talked on, explaining that the evidence against Eileen was strong, albeit circumstantial. “They’re going to hammer the implausibility of an intruder,” he said, thrusting two fingers at the file folders, “and we’re going to hammer back the implausibility of this mother killing her own child. They don’t have an eyewitness, but neither do we.”

  He curled his fingers and jounced an imaginary pebble. “And as you realize, there’s a worse problem: Eileen Tenaway doesn’t come across well. Increasingly these days, that is significant. Because this is going to jury, the DA is drooling at the prospect of sending this spoiled, complacent society mom to prison forever. Long before Roscoe Jamison, juries made up their minds about defendants partly based on the evidence and partly on the manner and appearance of the defendant.”

  “But now it’s getting worse?” I ventured.

  “Depends on your point of view.” Gary dropped his invisible pebble and took a pull from his water bottle. I watched the shadow crescent beneath his smooth Adam’s apple. “With Roscoe Jamison, I had a charismatic defendant. We picked a good jury, we led them to believe that their preconceptions against the LAPD were the most important thing to take into account, and they did. We won without putting Roscoe on the stand. So for us, it was good.” I got a creepy feeling, and he saw it in my face. “It’s irrelevant, Rita. Guilt or innocence is irrelevant.”

  “You’ve said that already.”

  “It’s always been this way. Most juries try hard to go by the facts. But they never act strictly on principle. I can prove it to you, if you’d like to sit and read historical transcripts and analyses for a few weeks.”

  That actually sounded like an interesting thing to do, but I just said, “I get it.”

  “Something tells me you don’t yet.” He reached for the laptop and touched some keys. His hands were well proportioned and loose, like a piano player’s, the fingernails clean and just perceptibly buffed.

  A series of video clips started up, and I realized I was seeing jurors emerging from various guilty verdicts.

  Gary named a case, a famous nat
ional-news-type murder. People with weary expressions stood on the steps of a courthouse talking to the camera.

  A guy in a Ford jacket mumbled, “She didn’t seem remorseful.” Another juror, clutching a suede purse, said, “She didn’t seem to feel all that sorry that her parents are dead.” Another: “She just seemed guilty.”

  Gary played half a dozen clips from the aftermaths of different trials, all of them showing jurors explaining their verdicts in the same terms you’d use talking about characters in a TV show:

  “She didn’t seem to care about her child at all. Poor little fella.”

  “He just didn’t act right. There was something odd about him. I couldn’t really follow all the stuff his lawyer said. He just seemed guilty.”

  “She just seemed guilty.”

  “He just seemed guilty.”

  Then Gary punched up another video file, this one of jurors emerging from acquittals saying, “Oh, obviously he was innocent. It was just obvious, you could tell by looking at him.” And the like. The last one showed a juror from Roscoe Jamison’s trial saying, “We got to guard our own.”

  My bones revolted under my skin. “Good God.”

  Gary punched up another movie, this one of a woman sitting cramped on a straight chair at a table in a depressing room. A man in a white shirt asked her questions. Gary froze the image and I studied it. Wearing her customary eye-popping jewelry—she had not yet been placed under arrest—Eileen Tenaway was as beautiful as ever. But Gary was right; her affect was blunted, odd, cold. She looked down at her hands on the table, which lay limp, as if the weight of the gold bangles and rings were too much for them. Gary murmured, with noticeable pain in his voice, “Eileen agreed to let the police question her before she hired me.” He turned up the volume.

  COP: Couldn’t Gabriella have gotten into those pills by herself?

  EILEEN: No, I kept them in the medicine cabinet.

  COP: Couldn’t she have climbed up and opened that cabinet?

  EILEEN: No.

  COP: Why not?

  EILEEN: It has a childproof latch.

  COP: Didn’t you just give her a few of those sleeping pills to quiet her down?

  EILEEN: No.

  COP: Why would an intruder use your Valium to kill your daughter?

  EILEEN: I don’t know.

  Her voice was flat except when she lifted her head at one point, trying for a bit of her habitual arrogance, trying to get the cop to think she was being honest. But I could see how emotionally shut down she was. Pitiable and miserable. As a mother I found myself aching for her, no matter what had really happened that night.

  Gary said, “I have a defendant who is totally unsympathetic to most everybody in Los Angeles, because she’s rich, gorgeous, self-satisfied, she’s everything people say they look down on but really envy. If people can’t have what they want, they like to destroy it. Never mind that the woman not only lost her daughter, she also lost her husband and her sister before all this happened. Nobody gives a damn about that, and they didn’t when it happened.”

  “Yeah, I remember. Like, a few months before the baby thing? Did they both die, or what?”

  “Richard Tenaway disappeared, then turned up dead in Brazil, one of the countries his business imported gems from.”

  Gary explained how Richard Tenaway had positioned his family as one of the most prominent in Los Angeles by making big money importing raw jewels from exotic places. He’d started the company with his best buddy, Padraig McGower, and built it to impressive size. Everybody in L.A. knew the name Gemini Imports, the world’s leading wholesaler of gem-quality emeralds, sapphires, and topazes, and everybody knew the names McGower and Tenaway. The partners specialized in those valuable stones, found in quantity in South America.

  “This was Eileen’s life,” Gary said. “Her husband and his partner started bold, made big mistakes, learned from them, and eventually they became unparalleled experts at judging uncut crystals. They got shrewder every day. She loved the glamour of what they did.”

  As he talked I understood how the guys’ success gave them access to big-shot bureaucrats and diplomats, who helped them breeze through government red tape that bogged down their rivals.

  “It was a good life,” Gary observed. “Tenaway and McGower collected fancy cars, both of them, and commissioned yachts. Tenaway called his the Gem and I, get it? Everywhere they went, they attracted envious attention, their trophy wives on their arms. Richard decked out Eileen in fine jewelry, I’m sure you saw the pictures in the magazines.”

  “Yeah, and she was Richard’s bauble.”

  “She loved the jewels, she loved the cars and the trips.”

  “Most women would,” I remarked.

  “And then it all changed.” When Richard Tenaway’s body was discovered, Gary told me, the local authorities didn’t have much to go on, and neither did anybody else. Eileen could find out little more, even when she went to the interior of Brazil herself with a private investigator and an interpreter to identify the body and look into what had happened. Tenaway’s body, with a gash on the head, had been found in a ravine. An accident? If not, there were no suspects anyway.

  “Furthermore,” Gary continued, “Eileen’s sister, Norah Mintz, disappeared the same time Tenaway did. Rumor was they ran off together, but when Richard turned up dead, there was no Norah to be found. That’s irrelevant to our case, but you should know it as background.”

  He paused and rubbed his chin glumly, thinking of something else.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Worse still for me, they’ve named Tracy Beck-Rubin lead prosecutor.” He glanced to see if I recognized the name. When I sort of didn’t, he said, “An up-from-blue-collar-land tough girl who knows how to hit all the right buttons of a jury. She was on the DA’s team against Roscoe.”

  “But they lost.”

  “Yes, but they learned a lot from the experience.” He slapped his thigh twice, then stopped, having forced away the negative thought. “Never mind,” he said cheerfully. “What did you think of Eileen?”

  I knew the power of personality so well, the power of make-believe. I said, “She’s in pain, and she’s too scared to remember how to manipulate people.”

  Gary beamed. “Wow! That’s cold, Rita, that’s cold. Excellent.”

  “That’s what you want from me, isn’t it?”

  “Can you help her?”

  “Yes, I think I can.”

  “Excellent!” Gary jumped up and paced the small office, snaking his hips around the side chairs and his desk and back around again. Today his trim butt was clothed in a pair of linen slacks, his torso in another silk polo shirt of a rich bronze color. He moved as if he enjoyed it, like a dancer. Nice. Very nice.

  “As a team,” he said, “we have to make the jury want to do something for her. We have to show her to be an innocent victim of forces beyond her control, beyond anyone’s control. Except the jury’s. They must understand they have total power, and they must feel free to exercise it.”

  “On her behalf.”

  “On her behalf. Now, I’ve figured out a basic defense, our team’s been working together from the beginning, and we’ve done all our homework. Jury selection’s going well.” Still pacing, he talked on. “As I said, we’re going to pound on the evidence of an intruder. We’ll show it was an extraordinary burglary, well planned, perfectly executed, except they didn’t find the wall safe with all her jewelry in it. We get Eileen to deny giving her child the Valium. We get her to deny it on the stand. We have to be very brash here, or we could go down. I believe our chances are better now that you’re on the team. Needless to say, she’s got money for all this. She’s paying me to talk to you right now, and as I promised, I’ll pay you a thousand of her dollars a day if you’ll help her.”

  “She knows about this already?”

  “Not yet.” He dropped to one knee next to my chair as if ready to sketch out a play on the rug, and turned the full force of his persuasive br
ain on me. “Rita, you’re perfect for this. You’re an appealing woman, you’ve got a little one of your own, your acting has a special warmth to it, it’s palpable. You make people like you. You can show her how you do it. With your help, Eileen could transform her presence in the courtroom.”

  Before I could say anything, he went on, “The fact that you’re so good yet so unknown is very important. Because if you agree to give acting lessons to Eileen Tenaway, you’ll have to do it secretly, during visits to the lockup.” He smiled excitedly.

  “Really? They didn’t offer her bail, huh?”

  “Not in a case like this. You’ll need to pose as a paralegal working for me. And it won’t stop there. I’ll want you in the courtroom as a silent support for Eileen, so you’d have to play the role there too.” He paused. “While it’s not illegal to prepare a defendant for trial, what I’m proposing may be considered...unethical. If the DA found out, forget it. I don’t see it that way, but since this trial will get lots of publicity, I want two things. I want to win, and I want to be very quiet about how I do it.”

  “What about the people in your office? I mean, the other lawyers on the team and stuff?”

  He shook his head, jaw firm. “I don’t intend to tell them about your real role. A thousand bucks a day, Rita, and acting for real, not pretending in front of a camera. It’ll be hard work, but I have the feeling you’re not afraid of that. If you say yes right now, I’ll give you money up front to buy some office-type clothes, if you need them, and to tide you over for the next few days. Then I’ll pay you in cash once a week. You’ll work at least Monday through Friday, probably some weekends too. That’s five to seven thousand a week.” He rested his arm on the table in front of me, and I stared at his fine black arm hairs and his wristbone. I could feel his eyes on the side of my face.

  A thousand a day was a couple hundred over SAG scale, which is toilet paper to a star, but for the likes of me? I closed my eyes and thought of all the months of rent I could save up, all the scrumptious food I could buy, all the beauty treatments I could pay for, all the new toys and clothes for Petey I could splurge on. A zero balance on the credit card.