Acts of Malice (13 page)

There was no point in making small talk, even if she had it in her to make small talk. ‘‘Dr. Hirabayashi—you remember her, she’s the pathologist we sent the boots to

—found some fibers in the grooves in the bottom of one of the boots,’’ she said.

She waited for Jim to go through the same process she had, to forge the connections.

‘‘Fibers?’’ Jim seemed confused.

‘‘Black cotton fibers.’’

The news had no effect. Jim looked into her eyes, interested but unafraid.

‘‘How did black cotton fibers get on the bottom of your boots, Jim?’’

Now he got it. His mouth fell open. He almost sputtered. ‘‘What’m I supposed to say?’’

‘‘Your choice,’’ said Nina. She took his arm. ‘‘Alex was wearing a black cotton shirt the day he died. You can tell me what you know about that, or not. Whatever you tell me, I’ll never reveal to anyone.’’

‘‘I have no idea! No idea!’’

‘‘Jim, I want you to know I can still help you, no matter what you may have done.’’

‘‘Oh, no,’’ Jim said. ‘‘This is unreal. Some fibers you can only see under a microscope have made you turn your back on me. You think I did it, don’t you?’’

‘‘I can deal with it if you did.’’ She tried to sound confident, nonjudgmental, to hide her disappointment. While she waited for him to speak again, she concentrated on his eyes, wanting to see inside to his naked soul.

He turned toward a stand of tall pines, placing his hands in the pockets of his parka. He stepped up and down on the snow in place, gently, as if lifting his feet was very, very painful, apparently unaware of the grotesque congruence of his actions with the accusation. His profile in the shadow of the evening revealed nothing except some confusion, and possibly some anger.

He was studying the matter, turning it over in his mind, and Nina had no idea what he was thinking. At the best of times, she would guess he was a very guarded person. And so, she realized, was she.

He turned back to face her. ‘‘You can’t tell anyone anything I say unless I give you permission?’’ Jim asked. ‘‘Attorney-client privilege, right?’’

Did this mean he was breaking the standoff? Was he about to tear down a wall and unload the real truth on her? She could not help experiencing a moment of personal fear—was she about to find out that at this very moment, she was standing on a darkening, desolate mountain with a vicious killer?

‘‘That’s right,’’ she said, coughing slightly to give herself a moment to regain her composure. ‘‘It’s a law. An attorney must hold the client’s secrets inviolate at every peril to himself,’’ she said, quoting the Business and Professions Code section which had been drummed into her in law school and which she considered the most important ethical rule of the profession.

She tried to think practical thoughts, preparing to offer him her best professional support. Surrender him, maybe get a psych report, bring in a lot of character witnesses at the sentencing—

‘‘Then there’s no point in lying. I’m not lying, Nina. I just don’t have an explanation for those fibers, unless it’s just some dumb thing like—we all buy our shirts at the same store, and my father happened to have one in his car when my boots got tossed in there or that, if Alex was in fact murdered in the moments before I got to him, the killer also decided to frame me and somehow set this whole thing up.’’

From the lodge, only a couple of hundred feet away, came the sound of clanking knives and forks, happy chatter.

‘‘Please believe me,’’ Jim said. ‘‘Please. I know I didn’t do anything to Alex. And you tell me now that there’s something on my boots that proves I did. Well, if that’s so, someone else put it there. I didn’t get down below the Cliff for almost ten minutes.’’

‘‘What are you going to tell me if the soles of your boots have the same pattern as the marks on your brother’s skin, Jim?’’ Nina said.

‘‘Then—it’s just awful. And if I ever find the bastard that did that to my brother, I’ll take him out. Look, Nina. Those boots I wear are like—the Nikes of ski boots. There’s nothing unusual about them. I suppose there was enough time Alex was out of sight for someone to hurt him like that, but it’s foul to think about. And all I can tell you is, you’ve got to believe me because I didn’t do it.’’

‘‘I don’t know how much time we have left,’’ Nina said. ‘‘A few days, maybe, while the coroner goes over the boots and makes tests. Then a few days more while the district attorney’s office reviews all this. But the fibers really back up Clauson’s conclusion that Alex’s death was a homicide, Jim. And the boots are yours. That’s enough to charge you.’’

‘‘Fuck,’’ Jim said bitterly.

‘‘One more question. I’m sorry but I have to ask it. Was Heidi seeing Alex—outside the marriage?’’

‘‘You mean, sleeping with him? God, no! Who said that?’’

‘‘It’s just something I have to check out.’’

‘‘Well, it’s a lie.’’

‘‘You’re sure?’’

‘‘Positive!’’

‘‘You said one time that she’d drawn away from you—’’

‘‘My wife was not sleeping with my brother,’’ Jim said very deliberately.

‘‘Marianne mentioned to me that—’’

‘‘Marianne is a vicious little liar. She’d love it if Heidi and I split up. She thinks she’s still in love with me. Is she spreading that lie?’’

‘‘Okay,’’ Nina said. ‘‘I hear what you’re saying. Now, I want you to go home and think about all this. We’ll talk again later.’’

‘‘I’m not lying! Tell me you believe me, Nina.’’

‘‘I’m on your side, Jim. I’m not saying that I don’t believe you. I’m going to think about what you said, keep looking into it. Now, we’ve hired an investigator, Tony Ramirez. He’s looking for Heidi. Maybe we can find her and straighten this out.’’

‘‘I trust you,’’ Jim said.

‘‘I have to go.’’

‘‘Are you married, Nina?’’

Involuntarily, she glanced at her ring finger with its faint crease. ‘‘Why do you ask?’’

‘‘Just that—’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘Nothing. Thinking about Heidi, I guess.’’

‘‘Here’s something else you should do. You need to put together some money in case you need bail.’’ She gave him the name of a good bail bondsman, just in case. ‘‘Can you get twenty-five thousand dollars in cash? I doubt the bail would be set higher than two hundred fifty thousand. You only have to put up a cash bond of ten percent. And your house.’’

‘‘It’s really going to happen, isn’t it? I’m going to be charged.’’ He sounded forlorn.

‘‘Try not to worry. I do have to tell you—I’m going out of town this weekend, leaving on Thursday morning. I’ll be back Monday night.’’

‘‘Leaving? Where are you going?’’

‘‘It’s a business trip. Sandy will be in touch with me if anything breaks.’’

Matt and Andrea said that Bob was welcome. The timing was bad, since he’d be leaving for his two weeks in Germany in three weeks, but she wanted to take this weekend with Collier more badly than anything she had wanted in a long time. Rising early and working late, she compressed the week’s work into three days and on Thursday morning took Bob to school. Matt would pick him up.

‘‘You’re sure it’s okay?’’ she said to him as he pulled his pack out of the truck and shouldered it.

‘‘It’s okay, Mom.’’

‘‘Really?’’

‘‘You have to promise I get to go with you next time.’’

‘‘Fair enough.’’ She kissed him on the forehead. ‘‘To Matt’s after school, don’t forget!’’ she called after him.

He joined the group of students walking across the field of snow toward his first class. He looked so tall. When had he gotten so tall?

11

ON LANIKAI BEACH. On the windward side of Oahu, away from the Waikiki scene, in a low white cottage built on sand. Benevolent gods and goddesses ruled from the fiery volcanoes, warmed the green sea, deposited the sand grain by grain onto the palm-fringed beach.

Collier had spent his healing time here.

She lay in his arms in the shade of a palm, snow and mountains and murder case forgotten, watching the cavalcade of walkers and joggers, silent for once. Implicit between them was their agreement: no talk of their work.

They swam through waves pleated with sun. The sea had an old calm. Underneath, in the shadowed shallows, a city of fish munching on the algae-covered coral, speckled, striped, translucent. She heard a crackling sound in the water when she dove down, as though the fish were talking to each other.

They came together way out from the beach, fitting as neatly together as two parts of a zipper. Nina swam away, laughing, and he followed her, toward the Mokoluas, the two wild islands in the distance.

Sunset. They sat at a table on the deck.

‘‘So—what do you think happened to you last year? I mean, how do you describe it to yourself?’’ Nina asked. She poured him another glass of wine. They were still in bathing suits.

Across the quiet sea, the Moks subsided into the twilight. The last kayakers set out from the tiny beach on the larger island, way out there, and headed back toward home.

‘‘Oh, I’d been on the job too long, been alone too long, grieved for my wife too long,’’ Collier said. ‘‘In our line, you have to have a life outside work, to keep it in perspective. I went into a tailspin, but I had to keep going, you know? Get up and get over to the office and try cases and make deals and talk to victims.

‘‘For a while it just took everything I had. That was all right, as long as I was still doing the job. The time came when I couldn’t do the job, though, and that was the end, because the job was my life. I started obsessing even more about my wife. I stopped sleeping. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before.’’

‘‘I think—that night on the roof of the casino—I think you were awfully close to death,’’ Nina said. ‘‘I’ll never forget it.’’

‘‘Afterwards, I just wanted to hide,’’ Collier said. ‘‘I was in touch with a professor from college who’d left academia and made it big in real estate in Honolulu. He and his wife own the big house next door. I called him. He offered to rent me this cottage. They only use it when their kids come to visit. I didn’t even leave the cottage for two weeks, not even to go to the beach. I felt like I’d been in a fire. Like a burn victim. I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.’’

‘‘I wish you’d called me.’’

‘‘I didn’t want to be found. But—later, when I started getting better, I looked back at Tahoe and I realized it had all been there, work that I loved and people that cared about me. So I gave myself a goal. To get it back. I didn’t think I deserved it, I wasn’t sure it was possible, but I had to try.’’

‘‘Did you ever talk to someone? A professional?’’

‘‘Just the local medico. He checked me out and told me to run on the beach and swim twice a day and to make some friends. And the main thing—you’re going to laugh, but he was right—he told me not to read.’’

‘‘Not to read anything?’’

‘‘Nothing. No newspapers, no magazines, no books. And no TV, no computer. He took away all the entertainments that made it possible for me to live in my head. He sent me outside like I was ten years old on a Saturday morning. I was desperate, so I took his advice. Mainly because I had decided I was the stupidest son of a bitch alive.’’

They smiled at each other. ‘‘Excuse me. I have to kiss you now,’’ he said. They did that for a while.

Breaking away finally, Nina said, ‘‘I’d like to hear the rest of your story.’’

‘‘Well, I did make some good friends here. Mark and Patty in the big house, and the kid that lives on the other side. Isaiah, his name is. He taught me the best snorkeling spots on the island. I’ll always come back here now. Once or twice a year from now on, I’ll set my work aside and go outside and live. You understand, don’t you, my darling?’’

‘‘Oh, yes. You have things to teach me now,’’ Nina said. ‘‘Collier? Have you ever thought—do you have a code of honor?’’

He looked surprised. ‘‘I wouldn’t call it that, but— once upon a time, I would have said, to try to right all the wrongs. But I couldn’t begin to do that. I thought about that a lot last year. I decided on something more realistic.’’

‘‘What was that?’’

‘‘To try to right some of the wrongs. Just some of them. Listen. Let’s bring Bob next time. We’ll take a boat out to the Moks.’’

She looked out to sea. Like the old Hawaiians said, everything was alive and moving: tinted clouds, sky exhaling trade winds, surf brushing shore, ti leaves and coconut palms trembling and waving, even the gullied cliffs behind them standing like leaf-skirted warriors against the sky, holding fast, watching the Pacific.

Dusk. The sky psychedelic. Collier cut up a mango and shared it with her. They sat outside and talked some more. Collier told her about his family and his childhood. She told him about Kurt, Bob’s father, and Jack, the lawyer she had married and worked with during her San Francisco days. As she talked, she realized that her past had become simple. It was the past, that was all. Now only the present was real.

Night in their bed. ‘‘I don’t want to go back,’’ she cried. She buried her face in the pillow.

Collier stroked her hair. ‘‘Let’s pretend this night never ends. Your hair is damp on the pillow. You are beautiful, and you are mine.’’ He stopped for a moment, then said in a low voice, ‘‘Will you agree to that, Nina? To be mine?’’

Nina got up on one elbow. Her hair fell across her face. He tucked it behind her ear. She wore white shell earrings he had bought her and nothing else.

‘‘I agree,’’ she said gravely.

‘‘I’m in love with you, Nina.’’

‘‘Oh, God. Are you sure?’’

‘‘Do you love me?’’

‘‘Oh, boy.’’

‘‘Tongue-tied, eh? Why can’t I do that to you in court?’’

‘‘It’s nothing to laugh about. It’s a very serious—’’

‘‘No, it’s not. I just wondered. It’s not a geometry test. You don’t have to try to figure out the correct answer. You know, you have the most remarkably beautiful neck. I like how it sits on your shoulders. I like the slope of your shoulders, and especially your collar-bones.’’ He lay his head on her chest as if he wanted to have a private communication with her heart.

‘‘I love you too,’’ she whispered. Relief overcame her as the fortress within her opened its heavy armored gates.

‘‘Let’s go for a swim,’’ he said a long time later. ‘‘We have all night. We won’t go to sleep at all tonight.’’

‘‘I don’t want to swim. I don’t like the dark water.’’

‘‘We’ll just wade.’’ He took her hand and she followed, cut free from all other anchors.

The sea lapped against their waists as they faced the mainland three thousand miles away. Cassiopeia and the Pleiades glimmered overhead. On the shore the shorebreak and bushes protected them from the view of the houses. The moon cast its familiar line of silver along the water.

She knew what would happen.

Collier came up behind her and pressed himself to her so she could feel him hard against her. His hands gripped her hips through her suit as he pulled her even closer against him. She leaned her head back and reached her arms back and held his head.

He leaned her over and she felt his hand under the water, pulling her suit aside. Waves washed across them and they almost lost their balance. He entered her suddenly, as impersonal as a sea god, and she closed her eyes and let go, letting him keep them both afloat, cool everywhere except in the burning center where he was.

The call and response of breathing began, and her breathing became moans. The sea moaned with her while the wind caressed her face. She felt his breath in her ear.

They rocked in the shifting sea. The unknown in her met the unknown in him.

Straining, he pulled her to him one more time. He groaned.

He fell away and she slipped under a wave. When she came back up, wiping the water away from her eyes, she saw his dark head deeper out, swimming with long strokes away from her. She let him go and watched for a long time, waiting patiently for him to return to her.

They had showered and gone to bed.

‘‘I want—I need our spirits to intertwine. So you never leave me again,’’ Nina said.

‘‘All right. We’ll stay here forever.’’

‘‘I’ll become a lei maker,’’ Nina said.

‘‘I’ll fish.’’

‘‘That’s good.’’

‘‘We’ll give Bob thirteen siblings, island princes and princesses, who drink coconut milk and play the ukelele . . .’’

‘‘And love to fend for themselves. Otherwise, we could never raise them.’’

‘‘Nina?’’

‘‘Mmm-hmm.’’

‘‘I would so love to have a child. I mean, I know I could love Bob. But, a baby.’’

‘‘I know.’’

‘‘What do you think about babies?’’

Dawn.

The plane left from Honolulu Airport at ten. They barely made it.

‘‘Nina?’’ She had been falling into a doze in spite of the noise of takeoff. His intensity had kept her awake all night.

‘‘What?’’

‘‘Do we have to stay alone, live alone, stay lonely all our lives?’’ Collier asked. ‘‘Is that our fate?’’ He was sitting bolt upright beside her.

‘‘It doesn’t seem like a very good plan anymore,’’ Nina answered drowsily. ‘‘What shall we do?’’

‘‘I’m not sure.’’

‘‘There are so many considerations,’’ Nina said.

‘‘But none of them matter. Not really.’’

His tone, so definite, woke her fully. She became aware of everything—the slightly stale air, the engine noise, the smell of his shirt, the scratches on the window.

‘‘I know we haven’t known each other very long,’’ he said.

‘‘Two years,’’ Nina answered. ‘‘I’ve sat opposite you in court many times, trying to understand what you were thinking, trying to figure you out. I know you very well. We think alike. We’re both trying to do the job and be decent about it. I know how intelligent you are, how mature, how good . . .’’ She saw how this praise affected him. He had no idea how good he was. No one had loved him for so long.

They were landing. ‘‘I can’t really be a lei maker,’’ Nina said. ‘‘Can you live with that?’’

Wheels bumped against tarmac. He nodded. He knew what she was explaining, that she wouldn’t change her work. It was all she did well and the only way she could help, and she knew he felt exactly the same way about his work.

‘‘We’ll figure something out,’’ he said.

‘‘The only thing is—I wish I’d never met Jim Strong,’’ Nina said. As soon as it was out, she wished she hadn’t said it. What she meant was, I wish that investigation weren’t between us right now, before we get a chance to figure out how to work in the same town. Collier might take it wrong and think—

But maybe he didn’t know about the fibers yet. Clauson might not have filed his supplemental report by the time they had left.

She was sure about it when he answered lightly, in that new warm voice of his, ‘‘Who knows? Maybe it’ll go away.’’

So she was still a step ahead of him. She knew that wasn’t going to happen.

She talked to Bob about her feelings for Collier that night. After initially acting very blasé, then asking a question or two about Paul, he began talking about his father and she realized that he had been nursing some private fantasies. He said he would think about all this and get back to her, and retired to the phone in his bedroom, where he would seek advice from people like Uncle Matt.

Of course, he would need time to get to know Collier.

It was only nine, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She climbed under the Hudson blanket in the cold attic room and set the alarm.

On Tuesday morning she had just taken her coat off and hung it on the rack at the office when Collier called, much sooner than she had expected.

‘‘You have until close of business today to surrender Jim Strong into custody at the South Lake Tahoe Police Department,’’ he said, his voice not brusque, not cold, just very different from the day before. ‘‘I’m telling you as a courtesy since he’s represented.’’

She kept her voice as professional as his. ‘‘I appreciate that. What’s the charge?’’

‘‘Murder. First degree.’’

‘‘I’m going to insist on a preliminary hearing within ten days.’’

‘‘Do what you have to do.’’

‘‘We’ll produce him.’’