The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Read online

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  I slammed the table. “If you’re so indifferent to everything, how come you didn’t just plead guilty and let them put you away in jail forever? What’s the difference?”

  She stared at the wall, but her gaze went much farther. “I do want to be free, Rita,” she said in a quiet voice. “I want to work with you. I do. I do. It’s just hard. I can’t cry in front of other people. The thought of being on trial. The thought of them all thinking...But I know it’ll pass. Everything does. I hope I’ll be able to—to have some kind of life.”

  With no window to the outside, the light in the little interview room was unvarying, and I found it disturbing that the shadows never changed, even slightly, as they would with a bit of daylight coming in.

  I breathed, and realized there was even more depth to Eileen Tenaway than I’d thought. Searching for common ground, I said, “You know, my older sister and I took ballet when we were little. I wasn’t very good at it, but I liked it. My sister was the real dancer between us.”

  Eileen looked at me as if surprised that I would speak about myself.

  I continued, “One time we had a quarrel about our ballet outfits. Our mother came in to break it up, and I remember yelling, I want two tutus too!”

  She laughed genuinely, with a lingering smile. “My sister always wanted what I had.”

  I said, “We’ve sort of grown apart, my sister and me. Yet if she wasn’t there, I’d miss her terribly, you know?”

  She nodded, somber again.

  “Tell me about your sister,” I suggested.

  Her face snapped shut as if a metal plate had dropped over it. Doomed, I thought, we’re doomed. Then suddenly it opened again, wide as could be, all her features quivering and raw, like the face of an adolescent in some tribal ritual that’s been going on for three days.

  She uttered a gush of despair and fury so fierce that my neck tightened. She laid her head on the table and sobbed.

  I touched her back and when she didn’t flinch I stroked it once, twice, then left my hand there. This close, I could smell her. She wore, I guessed, prison-issue deodorant, which gave off a Listerine-like odor. Or else it was the jumpsuit. Too bad. I wouldn’t want to smell like that.

  The deputy opened the door again. I took my hand away.

  At last Eileen looked up. I handed her a Kleenex.

  “Norah’s gone,” she said emptily.

  “You two were close once?”

  “I—I tried to look after her. She was my little sister. She came to me whenever she got in trouble, which was a lot. The trouble she’d get into! But the more I helped her, the more she asked from me.”

  “Uh-huh?” I coaxed softly. Her voice was cool and measured, in perfect keeping with her looks. It was a flexible voice, I thought, a possible asset.

  “One time I helped her out of a very bad situation. It was bad. I put myself in jeopardy to do it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wish to God I’d turned my back instead.” She fell silent.

  I waited. Finally I asked, “Well, how come?”

  Eileen opened her mouth and said, “Because if I had...” She didn’t finish.

  The metal sheet came down again and she said nothing more. After a time of sitting with her in silence, I left.

  Gary met me in the corridor. “How did it go?”

  I told him.

  “You moved too fast.”

  Defensively, I said, “Well, hell, we don’t have much time, do we?”

  “No,” he agreed. “Keep going.”

  “By the way,” I said, “how many men are you trying to get on this jury?”

  “Six,” he said firmly. “I think half-and-half will be ideal.”

  “I disagree. It’d be better to have more men than women, seven and five. Eight and four would be better, but maybe too obvious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most men are going to find it impossible to believe that a mother could kill her own child, versus women who know only too well.”

  He looked at me, shocked.

  I felt a surge of power.

  He stammered, “That’s what our jury consultant said, but I didn’t believe him.”

  Amid all this intensity my eyes and brain still registered Gary’s attractiveness. Actually, things were going beyond the liking-to-look-at-him stage. In the ongoing self-chatter that flowed endlessly through my brain, I had to admit the process was beginning, in spite of the fact that he was married, and often mentioned his wife, Jacqueline. Because I’d never met her, the wife was not concrete for me.

  When I fall for a guy I first notice his way of holding himself, which has a real effect on his looks. He could be rough logger-jack handsome or slim sophisticated magnetic or boyish winsome, but his body language always grabs me first. Gary, I realized, was a combo of slim sophisticated magnetic and boyish winsome. His body language was like good wine: assertive yet not domineering.

  Then the next thing occurs in my arms and legs, where I get a watery feeling when he crosses my mind or I see him. By now I’ve realized what a perfect person he is. Virile, intelligent, sensitive, protective, funny, appreciative, and loves kids.

  Then he just steps into the crosswalk of my mind and stays, standing there commandingly, thrillingly, as all other traffic flows around him. I get annoyed at this stage, as you get annoyed when your upstairs neighbor plays her Eagles records over and over with the windows open.

  Then I give in to the obsession and fall asleep and wake up to him, my pulse racing, and then when I see him my heart flies up on a songbird’s back and I grasp for the nearest support.

  Well, I’d certainly impressed him by my analysis of the jury-gender issue. “Huh,” he said wonderingly. He touched my elbow almost respectfully and we walked down the corridor side by side. I considered turning my ankle and falling into him, but that would have been cheap, so I held myself in rigid control. Right-left-right-left.

  Falling in love is such a pain in the ass.

  Chapter 11 – Seven Men to Five Women

  Something began to change in me the day the trial began.

  I wondered how Eileen would handle the stress. I’d been working with her for a week, Tuesday to Tuesday, and now it was Wednesday, go-day for everybody. I sat beside her at the defense table, watching and making notes. She appeared calm, which was good, and detached, which was bad. I wanted her to be fully present. I wanted her to be able to become distraught at times. It wouldn’t be realistic for her to be distraught the whole time, nor even possible, but I wanted her to have distraught handy, and she didn’t.

  I watched the jurors watching her. I could see them trying to make up their minds right away, because being undecided is stressful in and of itself. I mean, think about it: You encounter a stranger. Friend or foe? You want to figure that out immediately.

  For the jurors, breathless in their box, this would be one of the hugest experiences of their lives: deciding guilt or innocence in a murder case.

  Gary had managed a ratio of seven men to five women, along the lines of my advice.

  They were a working-class bunch, plus a few retirees. A couple were unemployed actors (none of whom knew me, fortunately), the rest were mostly people who have the sorts of jobs that pay you to go to jury duty. There was not an entrepreneur in the bunch, not a millionaire society matron in the bunch. To call this a jury of Eileen’s peers was a real stretch. “That doesn’t matter,” Gary told me. “I’d almost be more afraid of her peers anyway. Pack of dogs.”

  “Wouldn’t you,” I asked, “count as one of her peers?”

  He just smiled.

  Have I mentioned there were press all over the place? In the gallery, in the hallways, restrooms, cafeteria. There were only about fifty gallery seats for the press and other spectators in the courtroom, and they were all full. The reporters, lots from the Los Angeles media plus New York and even Europe, all shared a certain facial express
ion, a mix of tension and resentment: they were attentive, yet quick to boredom. Perhaps they didn’t think much of this assignment. After all, this was not like the Roscoe Jamison trial where they could hope for a race riot at the end.

  During voir dire I’d gotten to know the rest of the team. I liked Steve Calhoun, the prophet-bearded old lawyer Gary had brought in. I learned that Steve, with decades of experience defending hopeless cases in the L.A. system, had become this Yoda who could craft an alternate-theory defense for anybody, depending on which way the prosecution’s spear aimed. His chin was deeply cleft, and he had an impressive scar on his neck, which he told me was “a souvenir from the VC.”

  So he had fought in Vietnam. In other circumstances I would’ve asked him about it, but I didn’t want to get more personal with anybody than I needed to.

  Steve loved to talk law. “You can use a collateral fatality from a police chase to your advantage if you know how to spin it,” he told me over a chicken Caesar at lunch one day. “Never be afraid of blood. The bloodier the better, that’s my motto.”

  Then there was the boy lawyer Mark Sharma, who specialized in physical evidence. His parents back in India were waiting for him to come home and marry the girl they’d picked out for him when he was five. He had a moppish head of black hair and these hypnotic black eyes, and he spoke with an appealing Bombay lilt. He immediately saw that Gary’s and my relationship was close, and tried to make the best of it in spite of his natural jealousy. I was impressed.

  The paralegal, Lisa Feltenberger, also seemed to realize I was on a special track with Gary. However, this made her defer to me more, which was fine.

  Fascinated by everything from the bailiff’s gun belt to the prosecutor’s feline smile, I watched and watched. What happened in this room was real. What happened in this room was life, and it was death. I couldn’t get over it. Does that sound like the dumbest thing ever? It was so goddamned real.

  The prosecutor, Tracy Beck-Rubin, was as formidable as she was unfashionable. She stood a thick-waisted five feet ten or so in her chunky heels, but violin-string straight, with an attitude of respect and calculation toward everyone. Her hair was a blown-out brown halo and her cheeks were fuzzy. She looked like a hungry comic-strip cat dressed in a lumpy suit and those scuffed Naturalizers. Her eyes missed nothing.

  Looking down at my own much more perfect and expensive outfit, I felt unsettled—and fascinated. I was this little accessory to the proceedings, while she was a main player and could give a damn that her carnelian lipstick clashed with her gold silk blouse which clashed with her shell-pink nail polish. I couldn’t get enough of her.

  Gary had mentioned to me that he’d often felt, as a non-Jew, an outsider in the L.A. legal system. “A Jewish lawyer never loses that hunger,” he said, when we talked about Tracy, “no matter if they’ve made it, no matter if they’ve made it ten times over. They look after each other, and I admire that. I’ve had to work double hard to earn my place here. Come to think of it, Tracy doesn’t fit the stereotype either—she didn’t go to Harvard or Columbia or UCLA, she put herself through some crap law school by delivering pizzas and walking dogs, and she washed out of Lewis & Rossberg and nobody thought she’d make a name for herself, but she has. She went over to the DA’s office and they saw she could work a jury. I was lucky to beat her on Roscoe Jamison. Trouble is, she’s got it in for me now.”

  And indeed, when Tracy Beck-Rubin glanced toward the defense table, she aimed her gaze at Gary with teasing contempt. She was, I realized, the kind of girl I would have avoided in high school, a girl so frankly herself and so uninterested in pleasing others she seemed almost menopausal.

  In her opening statement she welcomed the jury with a warm smile, then hit immediately and hard on the evidence against Eileen: her house, her child, her pills.

  Gary had wondered which offensive strategy she’d take: Lazy Mom Who Gave Kid Pills to Shut Her Up, or Selfish Mom Who Wanted Rid of Kid to Attract New Mate. She went with Selfish Mom right off the bat:

  “Yes!” Beck-Rubin said, with an open-handed gesture from her heart to waist level, a graceful yet decisive gesture, “For a woman like Eileen Tenaway, once the gravy train stopped—that is, once her husband was found mysteriously dead!—she wanted to find another one. She wanted to hitch herself to another rich, exciting man. Look at her, ladies and gentlemen. A very pretty woman—lucky to be so pretty—and she’d used her beauty to capture a top-level businessman, and she enjoyed the ride, oh, yes!” Then, softer, “Who wouldn’t? But enjoying the ride doesn’t entitle you to commit murder. We will show you, ladies and gentlemen, that Eileen Tenaway enjoyed that ride so much—the jewels, ladies and gentlemen! the first-class tickets! the champagne receptions with celebrities!—that she would do anything to have it again.”

  Beck-Rubin settled her gaze into the jury box. “Well, we might ask, what’s wrong with that? Nothing! Unless she decides she’d be better off childless. Unless she decides a high-class man won’t look at her twice if he sees a baby in the background, no matter how far into the shadows she tries to push her! Little Gabriella!”

  Tenderly, the prosecutor picked up a photograph from the defense table and held it before the jury. It was the same shot, mounted on posterboard, that Gary had brought to Eileen. “Gabriella Elizabeth Tenaway. We could try to imagine what the fullness of her life might have been like. But there will be no life for little Gabriella.” She held the photograph as if it were alive. “Never to learn her colors. Never to ride a bicycle. Never to kiss a boy. Never to win a scholarship. Never to play the guitar nor plant a tree nor graduate with honors nor negotiate a labor contract nor run for office nor give birth! Nor lay a cool cloth on the brow of her dying mother someday.” The jury gasped.

  “Ladies and gentlemen. For Gabriella, everything is never.”

  This speech pressed incredible sadness into the faces of the jurors, it bent their shoulders. A couple of the women and one of the actors blinked back tears. The others swallowed.

  “But there is one thing Gabriella can have. Only one thing, and you are here, ladies and gentlemen, to give it to her. Justice.” The prosecutor belittled the scant evidence of an intruder: the ransacked house, a Starbucks coffee cup found by police on the little girl’s dresser, and a dirty baseball cap caught in the bushes outside. She talked about the effects of tranquilizers on an infant’s body, and she hinted certain things about Eileen’s social life—at least as far as she could between objections from Gary. The fingerprints and DNA on the items did not match each other, nor did they match Eileen’s, nor Richard’s DNA, which was harvested from a pathology sample from minor surgery he’d had not long before his disappearance from L.A.

  “The defense will speculate that this so-called evidence came from somewhere. Somewhere. Right. Like from a garbage can on Sunset Strip! There are no other suspects, ladies and gentlemen, because there is no other murderer. She sits, charged with her crime, before you.”

  Eileen sat quietly through all this. At times she shook her head no. We naturally knew that Tracy Beck-Rubin wanted to stir the jury’s emotions against her. But Eileen needed to have her emotions ready too, and she simply didn’t. If only I could have acted Eileen’s role for her. I sat twisting a fingerful of hair in frustration.

  Yesterday I’d told her, “Here’s who you are in the courtroom: a proud woman, but a sensitive one. You’re a woman who had it all and now has nothing—nothing except your dignity and your honesty. You don’t understand why you’re here. You’re devastated that your daughter is dead. You almost don’t care anything about yourself—but what you want is to know who the hell did it? This should be in your heart all the time, because then it’ll show on your face. See the difference between being focused on Who the hell killed my baby? versus I hope I can convince them I didn’t do it. See the difference?”

  Eileen said she did.

  But she could not focus and carry it out. She looked miserable and cold sitting there, her beauty up front, dullness
behind her eyes. Gary had wisely given the job of bringing clothes for Eileen to Steve Calhoun, who knew to pick dark, conservative dresses. Eileen had been strictly forbidden to spice up her hair or use any cosmetic but a little lipstick. She obeyed, but she would have had to wear a bucket over her head to conceal her God-given skin and bones and flesh.

  I could tell the jury wanted to like her, but her beauty was off-putting, at least to the women. I could see them thinking, She must have brought this on herself somehow.

  The rich and beautiful are not allowed to have problems.

  Gary’s opening statement struck a gentle tone, a tone of reason.

  “A terrible thing happened the night Gabriella Tenaway died,” he began. “Those of us who are parents can begin to imagine how Eileen Tenaway felt when she found her daughter lying still in her crib. But none of us can know what it’s like to lose a child, unless it has happened to us. To lose a child to murder. And certainly we cannot know how it feels to then be accused of being the murderer. Yes, a terrible thing happened. And then a second terrible thing happened, when the police decided to charge that little girl’s mother with the crime. During this trial I will show you what a cruel mistake that was.”

  He went into almost as much detail about the evidence as Tracy Beck-Rubin had, only with a different slant: an intruder killed that child, and Gary promised to make it plain as day.

  He held up his own photograph of Gabriella, this one a candid of her in a playground swing, laughing to the sky. “My colleague told us about all the nevers for Gabriella. And there are more nevers. Yes. The nevers are for that baby’s mother. Eileen Tenaway will never hold her child in her arms again.” He tolled his words slowly. “She will never comfort her again. Never bathe her. Never buy school shoes for her. Never sit in the audience watching her in the fifth-grade play. Never ground her for staying out too late. Never cry at her wedding.”

  Every single juror exhaled in wistful sympathy, matching Gary’s sad, small smile. He knew that if they didn’t warm up to Eileen herself, he sure as hell would make them like him. And he did.