The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Read online

  Other things that moved him were pictures of racing yachts cutting through the ocean, the patch of purple irises that came up every year from a damp dirt corner near a laundromat in his neighborhood, and people who pursued principle at the expense of comfort.

  He continued talking to his boss. “Offshore money, maybe. Political influence, maybe. I think political influence has potential with this guy. Or there’s something about the woman, this Norah Mintz. Anyhow, he goes to the place where the gems come out of the ground, he goes to a place he’s been to on business a hundred times. You’d think he’d pick a different country, or at least a different region. Was he starting up a new business? Did he want his supposed body to be found? It’s all so ambiguous. That autopsy report looked like a ten-year-old wrote it, and the anatomical—”

  “We don’t even require an autopsy, you know that. And she comes back with this photograph, the wife does.”

  “Yeah, that thing gave me the creeps. I gotta see it again, Avery. I gotta have the original, OK? Make a copy for you guys.”

  Rowe wandered to the window, talking. From it he had an unspoiled view of a chicken shack, a billboard with an ad for the DVD of Fingershredder, and the backside of a strip plaza anchored by a teriyaki carryout restaurant and a Vietnamese manicure salon, all topped by a jagged row of greenery. Eucalyptus and palm trees swayed like a dark crown over the tough little neighborhood. It was one of the last tough little ones in Culver City. He sighed with satisfaction. “She comes home with that picture and a jar of ashes. She just sits there on the money. Doesn’t go out, doesn’t do anything. Three months later—barely three months—she’s up for the murder of her own child. That doesn’t smell good either. See, what I’m saying is, if she didn’t kill the kid, then the kid’s death is related to Tenaway’s disappearance. It just is. Then there’s the sister-in-law thing, not to mention McGower, the business partner. He’s got to have something. The fact that the company’s not public is a hindrance to us, because—”

  “Yeah, but they showed us their last audit!”

  “That thing’s a piece of crap, it’s a hologram. Avery, you gotta take my word for it. You gotta.”

  “How much budget do you need?”

  Rowe stopped, surprised. He collected himself and plunged on. “Well, the policies were ten million each, right? Ten to the widow and ten to the company.”

  “Right. But they’ve been paid.”

  “Yeah, OK. Fifty. I need fifty thousand.”

  “Thirty.”

  “Fifty.”

  “Forty.”

  “Fifty.”

  “Goddamn it, George.”

  “Thank you, Avery. Thank you very much. I’ll stop in for everything in the morning.”

  By way of tidying his apartment, Rowe took digital photographs of his whiteboards, then erased them. He packed a pair of pants, two shirts, a change of underwear and socks, his cherry rubber flip-flops, a bottle of insect repellant, and his toilet kit into a rough canvas bag he had defaced with random strokes of permanent black marker to make it look dirty and poor. He buried his digital camera and a handful of batteries in the bag. He stood in his shorts and bare feet and considered, then went to a drawer and got out a small paper kite kit, a ball of string, a miniature chess set, six brand-new Duncan Avenger yo-yos, and a collapsible plastic drinking cup that made a satisfying sound when opened and closed. He put those things in too.

  He found his passport. He went to his computer and bought an airline ticket to São Paulo.

  Chapter 10 – Improvisation for the Defense

  “You know,” I told Gary on the way to court after we left Eileen Tenaway at the jail, “I’m going to have about a fifteen-minute grace period with your team when they’re going to believe I’m a paralegal. I can scribble on yellow pads and look intelligent, thus convincing any onlooker I know what I’m doing, but your real law people are going to ask me something about some motion or use some acronym and I’m going to look blank and they’re going to know. You really should tell them something that won’t instantly undermine my credibility. And yours.”

  “You’re right,” he said, knuckling his chin as he checked his mirrors for a lane change. “I’ll tell them you’re my mistress and I’m hiding you in plain sight.”

  I spewed coffee all over the dashboard of his Mercedes.

  “Easy, Rita.”

  I blotted my skirt and the dash with a clump of napkins. “Relax,” he said, with a rough edge that sent a thrill through me. “Just whistle a happy tune. You’re a special assistant to me, and you do only what I tell you. Look, the law is no mystery, it’s mostly common sense.”

  “But...you must admit there’s a lot of specialized knowledge involved!”

  “Paralegals prepare documents, they look up stuff. And they prepare witnesses, so this is all very ordinary. Look, it’s just not that hard. I told my team I brought you into this case mostly for show, because I wanted a woman at the table. My real paralegal gets too nervous to sit at the defense table, so that made sense. You don’t have much trial experience, but you’re good at reading people. You help defendants relax, and you help your team. OK?”

  “I actually studied psychology.”

  “I sensed that.”

  “I’m really nervous.”

  “Be nervous, then. You don’t have to reveal your pathetic lack of confidence unless you want to.”

  I sat there fuming. And I realized he was right. He and I were running a con, and the point of a con is not fooling people who don’t know any better. The point is fooling people who do know better. That I was capable of. My whole career was a con. My whole life, for God’s sake.

  _____

  The rest of the defense team consisted of a young India-born lawyer named Mark Sharma who was cute and tried to walk with a swagger, a doddering white-beard lawyer in cowboy boots named Steve Calhoun, and the real paralegal, a round-shouldered thing in a beige cardigan sweater named Lisa Feltenberger.

  “That’s it?” I said, remembering the cast of thousands he’d hired to help defend Roscoe Jamison.

  “You have to understand,” Gary explained, “Roscoe wanted and expected a huge team. An ego thing. I made sure everybody had a job to do. It worked, for him, in spite of the problems it caused—the infighting, the resentments. I tend to feel too much hoeing ruins the rice crop.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Old Japanese proverb.”

  I asked him about his surname, Kwan, which I always thought was a Chinese name. He told me there had been a mixup at his ancestors’ port of entry, and then he laughed and shrugged. I was impressed by his ability to just live with that odd contradiction.

  Watching Gary handle the final stages of voir dire, or jury selection, I marveled at his ability to transform himself into whatever the instant demanded. Half the time he was an inexorable machine that flattened all obstacles without mercy, the other half a social worker dressed in a teddy bear suit.

  Gary, unsure how to categorize a particular prospective juror, probing: “So your mother was arrested for shoplifting, but they realized they were mistaken and let her go?”

  Prospective juror, a white man who said he was a short-order cook: “Yes.”

  Gary, head cocked to one side: “And you say this has made you distrust the United States justice system?”

  Prospective juror, enunciating extra clearly: “It’s more of a constitutional objection that I have.”

  Gary, puzzled: “But they realized they were wrong and let her go.”

  Prospective juror: “I took it very personal.”

  Gary, coaxingly: “It seems to me you could also view it as an affirmation of the American justice system.”

  Prospective juror: “All I know is they made my mother cry.” Gary, on his side now, gently: “Did anyone ever pay for that mistake?”

  Prospective juror: “No, sir. No way!”

  Gary, with quiet sympathy: “Thank you.”

  To me, he muttered, “Keeper.”

&n
bsp; The courtroom, the Honorable Gerald S. Davenport presiding, was in the Los Angeles Superior Court system, Airport Courthouse. I had never heard of this place. Gary told me it had been built to handle the burgeoning caseloads of West Los Angeles, which included Beverly Hills, where Eileen Tenaway allegedly committed murder. It was shiny and clean and up to the latest seismic code, which is good to know when you’re six stories above street grade in Southern California.

  There is an Old Los Angeles and a New Los Angeles, and the definitions of those terms vary by individual. While the La Brea Tar Pits and the oil field along south La Cienega are all parts of everybody’s Old Los Angeles, Bergamot Station’s art galleries, for instance, could fall into either category. In Old Los Angeles buildings were interesting, if unsafe in an earthquake. And there was never enough parking.

  This courthouse rose from a tract of land just south of LAX, one of those baked wastes worth millions. The building stuck up from the barren dirt cool and handsome, and its green glass and buff stone, its fine wood paneling, plentiful restrooms, and ergonomic seating made me feel like a citizen. You could view the whole city from the broad windows, glimpse the HOLLYWOOD sign on a clear day, follow, at eye level, the approach of jet after jet as they glided down into the teeth of the prevailing westerlies. The feeling of command over space was unmistakable, yet as I stood at the windows at recesses and watched cars circling the absurdly small parking lots hoping for spaces to open, I realized the place was as classically underparked as if they’d situated the building in the median strip of the I-5.

  This was everybody’s New Los Angeles.

  _____

  After that first day, my life settled into a chaotic rhythm: jump out of bed at five and do my stretches before Petey woke, fix, eat, and clean up breakfast, throw the boy in the car, zoom to preschool thanking God for whoever invented preschool, plow over to the lockup to meet with Eileen for an hour, then off to court, where I would sit and take a deep breath, look at my watch, and be amazed that it was only nine o’clock. It was a straight shot across the 105 from the CRDF to the courthouse.

  The money was already making a huge difference in my life, mostly because it made me feel calm no matter how hurry-up things had become. I had almost no time to shop, but managed to splurge on some new sneakers and toys for Petey—I got him a Slinky and an Etch A Sketch in defiance of the damn electronics, which caused him no little puzzlement. He’d play with them, but always with an expression like, There’s got to be more here, I’ve got to figure out how to turn this thing on.

  I bought a spring-green sweater set for myself. I admit it: I like sweater sets, the fine-gauge kind that show off my breasts, with sleeves on the cardigan I can push up. They make me feel respectable yet sporty.

  Perhaps needless to say, I’d redeemed Gramma Gladys’s brooch as soon as I could. Mr. puppy-shirt gladly took my $433—the four hundred plus interest—and I loved the sound of his door whispering shut behind me. I put the brooch back in the safe-deposit box for the next bad spell which I hoped would never come.

  I briefly tormented myself with the memory of having gone to the ABC Mission down in South Central to ask for help with my utilities bill once, just before I’d defaulted on my credit card and hocked that brooch. They’d paid off my $246 debt to PG&E, thus forestalling our electricity getting cut off. The square-shooting black lady who runs that place was so good and kind to me, this desperate white chick. I sent a check for $500 to the mission and resolved never to lean on charity again.

  The focus of my life became Eileen. With her, in the lockup, I began with simple relaxation—arm circles, leg swings, melt-into-the-chair—then progressed to basic concentration and elimination of distractions. Everything was a struggle.

  I’d make small talk to try to relax her, which would work briefly. She seemed to enjoy talking about jail. She shared a cell with a pregnant African-American who had not been quick enough on the flush when the police raided her boyfriend’s apartment for methamphetamine.

  “She’s twenty-two and she wears these incredibly thick glasses,” Eileen told me the second morning. “Her lawyer gave her a pen and a yellow pad and she’s writing a long letter to the Pope.”

  “The Pope—as in, the Pope in Rome?”

  “Yeah, she picked up some Catholic tract somewhere. She’s hoping he’ll send her personal advice and baby clothes. ‘He’s been through a lot too,’ she says.” Eileen cupped her chin for a moment. “She hasn’t asked me for advice. Hell, maybe I should write to the Pope.”

  On the third morning I told Eileen, “You’re not working with me. You have to learn to manage your emotions, which doesn’t just mean keeping them bottled up. When I called you a baby-killer and a bitch at our first meeting, you barely reacted. Listen, acting is a social art, and it’s play. But we’re not even going to talk about acting. Because what the jury needs to see is the real you, the one they want to root for.”

  “They’ll want to root for me?” Her eyes looked oppressed.

  “Yes! That’s what actors always forget! Eileen, it’s death to be afraid of an audience. They’re not bacteria. They’re humans who want to see a good show, they want to be absorbed by a show. They want you to tell them the story they want to believe.”

  I realized right then my whole paradigm. “A jury is a herd,” I explained, “but you win them over one by one. We’re going to tailor a manipulation plan for them.”

  She smiled slightly.

  “You don’t want to show tension,” I told her. “You’re in court, and you’re confused as to why you’re there. But you’re secure in yourself. You’re secure in your innocence. People are attracted to that quality. Before you can lay confusion and grief over that, you’ve got to be relaxed and easy.”

  I noticed her chest was tight, she was taking short, constricted breaths from her upper lungs.

  “I know you know what I mean,” I said. I was talking her language. “Now, I really don’t have to keep doing this with you, because you’re probably—”

  She put her hand toward me and inclined her chin in a gesture of acceptance. Gary, who had come with me this morning and stood watching us from a corner, licked his lips and remained silent.

  “OK, let’s just try something,” I said, scooting my chair nearer. “I don’t like meditation,” she warned.

  People who appear dull or angry are always tense. If you get rid of the tension, you have a chance to see the real person.

  “We won’t do any, then,” I assured her. “All I’m talking about is breathing. We’re only going to count our breaths. You know, breathing is very underrated in our society.”

  Gary grunt-laughed.

  Eileen looked at me as if she disliked me for making her like me.

  “Gary, you join in too,” I urged. He smiled, crossed his arms, and remained standing.

  I went on, “We’re just going to release our breath, just focus on breathing out, and let the in-breath take care of itself. We’ll let the universe feed us a little air, OK? Breathe all the way out now, all the way.”

  Eileen did, and immediately took a half breath and held it. Her chest seemed tight as ever. I talked to her about slackening her stomach and letting her back widen so more air could come in.

  After a few minutes I thought she was getting the hang of it. Her breathing became somewhat deeper both in and out.

  “Eileen, next I’d like to do an improvisation Audrey Hepburn used to love to do.”

  She looked at me with a spark. The spark had two parts, the first being an attraction to the word improvisation, the second being an interest in Audrey Hepburn.

  She said, “Did you—”

  “No, but I worked with her drama coach during a summer stock thing in Majorca.” The side of my face felt Gary’s incredulous stare. “Back when I was a kid,” I added.

  “Yeah?” said Eileen.

  Duh, I said to myself, I should have been dropping names from the start. “Yes, Dennis Hopper was part of that group as well. OK, we d
o this one standing up. Come here. I’m going to stand behind you. You stand upright. Now you’re going to feel my hands.” I placed my palms on her shoulder blades and felt her back muscles go rigid. “Now lean back a little on my hands.”

  She remained upright.

  “Just lean back very slightly. I’ll hold you up. Come on, it’s all right,” I coaxed, in the supergentle tone I used with Petey when he woke from a nightmare.

  Still she stood.

  “What are you feeling, Eileen?”

  The deputy opened the door and ordered, “No touching!”

  I backed off, saying “OK, let’s just talk some more.”

  Looking impatient, Gary left the room. Eileen sat with me, relieved. When she flexed her body to sit I saw how sharp her hipbones were, through that dreadful orange suit. I said, “How’s the food in here?”

  She snorted. “It’s not food, it’s garbage.”

  “Maybe I can bring you something good. What would you like?”

  “Oh, I’m getting my granola and some eggs and things delivered. Gary set that up first thing.”

  “Oh, so you’re not getting any Gift Packs.”

  “What are those?”

  I told her about the sign in the waiting area that pictured clumps of junk food and toiletries. INMATE GIFT PACK, IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A WAY TO SHOW YOUR LOVED ONE YOU MISS THEM. CANTEEN CORRECTIONAL SERVICES HAS THE ANSWER. ORDER AN INMATE GIFT PACK. SELECT ONE OF THE PACKS BELOW AND IT WILL BE DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR LOVED ONE. THIS IS A GOOD ALTERNATIVE WAY TO DEMONSTRATE YOUR AFFECTION FOR THAT SPECIAL PERSON. BARE NECESSITIES PACK, COMFORT PACK, MEAT&CHEESE PACK, HOT&SPICY PACK, CHOLOLATE LOVER PACK, MEGA PACK.

  “The prices start at ten dollars, I think. I could—”

  “No, it doesn’t matter. Mostly I give the stuff to the other girls anyway. Tawny’s discovered flaxseed bread. She loves it.”

  “Is there anyone from your family who visits?”

  “I have no family.”

  “Are your parents dead?”

  “My mother died five years ago, and my dad lives, if you can call it that, in a nursing home in Palo Alto. He had a stroke and he’s pretty much a vegetable.”