Degree of Guilt (71 page)

‘I’m pretty tired.’ Paget stared at his drink. ‘I have a lot to think about.’

His voice was not welcoming, nor did he wish it to be. He did not know what he would do about anything: reassuring Carlo was beyond him, and he did not have the resources to lie. All that he wanted from anyone was that they want nothing from him.

But Carlo could not know this. He walked inside, flicking on the illuminated chandelier. ‘This room is pretty weird without the lights.’

Paget sipped his drink. ‘I’m capable of finding the switch.’

Carlo paused, as if deciphering his mood. Quietly, he said, ‘You think she’s guilty, don’t you?’

Paget did not turn. ‘If you really care to know, Carlo, I’m sick of thinking about her at all.’

‘
Jesus
.’ Carlo’s voice rose with sudden strain: it still had the lightness of youth, but there was something new in it. ‘Why do you hate her so much? What did she ever do to you?’

The words had an angry timbre that Paget had never heard from Carlo and yet touched a chord of memory: it was like that of Jack Woods on the last night they had faced each other, with Mary Carelli – their lover – standing between them. The thought made Paget turn to Carlo.

The boy he saw now startled him. His face was older; it had the look of a man whom Paget had despised. The blue eyes were not Paget’s at all.

How, Paget wondered, could he have failed to see it?

‘It’s as she’s always said,’ Paget replied. ‘I’m an insensitive bastard.’

Carlo stared at him, as if at a stranger. ‘You think she’s guilty,’ he repeated.

Guilty of a thousand things, Paget thought. Guilty of this moment, as he faced the son who was no longer his and yet who felt the anger of a son. ‘You were the one who wanted to be there,’ Paget said. ‘What do you want from me now? To tell you that she’s wonderful?’

Carlo reddened. ‘What are you angry at
me
for?
I didn’t
ask for any of this. Or for either one of you.’

Paget caught himself, expelled a long breath. ‘I know you didn’t,’ he said tonelessly.

Carlo watched him. ‘You’ve been surprised in court before. You can’t just fall apart on her.’

‘Who said I’m falling apart? I’m just sick of people leaning on me.’

Carlo stiffened. ‘Like me?’

‘Like your mother. It seems I’ve spent my life cleaning up her messes.’ Paget lowered his voice again. ‘It’s complicated, and much too personal. You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Try me.’

Paget shook his head. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘Thank you.’

‘You mean you’d rather take it out on me.’ Carlo’s voice was raw. ‘Do you think you’re alone? This hasn’t been any day at the beach for
me
, you know.
She’s
my mother, and I have to live with
you
.’

‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a burden.’ Paget answered politely. ‘Would you rather not live here?’

Carlo shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Would you like me to go?’

The boy’s words quivered with pain and anger. ‘I didn’t want to have this conversation,’ Paget said. ‘I
don’t
want to have this conversation.’

Carlo turned from him. ‘All I wanted was to talk to you. It didn’t have to be about
her
.’

The stark request took Paget by surprise. For a moment, he saw not Jack Woods but a lonely seven-year-old boy.

‘I’m sorry,’ Paget told him. ‘This case has taken a lot out of me. Too much, it seems.’

Carlo looked down at him with Jack Woods’s eyes. ‘Mark Ransom was a piece of shit.’

Paget shook his head. ‘This isn’t about Mark Ransom.’

‘Then what
is
it with you and her?’

‘History.’

‘Fifteen years is too long to hold a grudge.’ Carlo paused. ‘She doesn’t hate
you
.’

‘You don’t know anything about us, Carlo. It was a mistake for me to do this. Perhaps it’s best if Mary gets another lawyer.’

Carlo stared at him. ‘
Now?
’

‘Yes.’

‘But you can’t do that. Not on the last day.’

Paget faced him again. ‘She and I have already discussed it. She left it up to me.’

Carlo paused, trying to absorb the implications. ‘What is it that I don’t know?’

There was no use in lying. ‘Quite a lot.’

Carlo sat down. Softly, he asked, ‘Did she admit killing him?’

The conversation was so pointless, Paget thought: the central issue between Paget and Carlo’s mother was not Mark Ransom’s murder, and had never been. ‘She
did
kill him,’ Paget answered. ‘The question was whether she killed him in self-defense.’

‘“Was,”’ Carlo quoted. ‘So now you don’t think she’s innocent.’

The anxious questions annoyed Paget – he no longer cared whether Mark Ransom had deserved to die. But the only way to explain that to Carlo was to tell him the truth: Your mother lied to the Senate. She lied to this court. I covered for her fifteen years ago, and tomorrow, if I’m still her lawyer, I’ll have to cover for her again. And by the way, you’re not my son. I just found out she lied about that too.

‘I don’t think she planned to kill him,’ Paget said. ‘But I question my effectiveness. So does she.’

‘Because of that psychiatrist?’

‘No. Because of
us
.’

‘“Because of
us
,”’ Carlo repeated. ‘What has
she
ever asked you for? You sit here telling me what a burden she is, and she’s never even been around. And now that she is, and really needs you for once, you treat her like dirt.’

Paget stood. ‘I
will
not talk about this, damn it.’

‘We’re going to.’ Carlo rose to face him, voice trembling. ‘
You
drove her away, didn’t you? She was never welcome here –’

‘
Stop this
, Carlo. Right now.’

Carlo shook his head. ‘
I
never had a mother because
you
never wanted me to have one. You wanted me to yourself. And now that I may lose her again, you won’t lift a finger.’ Carlo paused, catching his breath, and then spoke more slowly. ‘I always looked up to you. But now I see how selfish you are. You say you’re sick of my mother? Well, I’m sick of
you
.’

Paget clenched his fists, rigid with hurt and anger. ‘You have no right to be sick of me, Carlo. You don’t know how little right you have.’

Carlo’s face was a mask of pain. ‘Don’t talk down to me. I don’t respect you enough to listen.’

In one angry motion, Paget picked up his drink glass. Carlo’s white face was three feet from him. Paget suddenly turned and flung the glass at the palm tree outside.

As the window shattered, Carlo flinched but did not move.

‘Then you won’t have to listen,’ Paget said softly, and left the house.

Teresa Peralta’s headlights cut the darkness.

The beach was deserted. A full moon lent the ocean a touch of light, silver on obsidian, shimmering at low tide. But the sand itself was dull black, as if stained by an oil slick. At its edge, perhaps a hundred yards away, Terri saw the lone figure of a man, staring out at the water.

There were no other cars. She parked where the cement ended, got out. The man turned at the sound of her car door slamming.

Terri moved toward him, sand giving way beneath her feet. The night was still warm; she hardly felt the breeze in her face. The rolling tide was a deep susurrus of sound.

The man stood waiting, as if uncertain of who she was. His hands were shoved in his pockets; backlit by the moon, he looked slender and solitary. As she came nearer, she saw that he had not changed from court; his shirtsleeves were rolled up, and his tie and collar loosened. He looked much too young to have lived the life he had lived and to bear what it had brought him now. All that she wanted to do was hold him.

She stopped two feet away, looking up into his face.

‘It’s all a mess,’ Christopher Paget said.

Terri nodded. After hours of aimless driving, he had called her on his car phone, ostensibly to explain why he had not called her before; he had told her just enough for her to sense that beneath his emotionless words, Paget felt lost.

‘The beach is where
I
come,’ she told him, ‘when it gets to be too much. But never at night.’

Paget gazed at her. ‘Was there trouble with Richie?’ he asked.

Terri hesitated. It was she, not Paget, who had suggested that they meet; it was not the night to explain her relationship to Richie, and there might never be such a night. Best to stick to the simple truth – that Richie had not objected much – and omit the reason: that Richie had commenced a relentless campaign to keep her, appealing to her sense of family while reading one self-help book after another, swearing that their marriage could be healed if only Terri tried as hard as he was trying. It made her weary, and guilty about her dead emotions. She felt as though by asserting herself she had changed him, so that now he – and Elena – deserved the second chance Terri was not sure she wanted to give. Letting her leave without complaint was part of the new Richie: if Christopher Paget would ever be one of Richie’s weapons again, Terri sensed, it would be after she was bound to the marriage once more, perhaps by the second child Richie had begun to press for.

‘Richie was fine about it,’ she told Paget. ‘He knows we still have work to do.’ She paused, looking into his face. ‘Do we?’

He gave a weary shrug. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What happened, Chris?’

Paget did not answer. He turned from her, hands still in his pockets, and began walking along the edge of the water. Terri understood that she was to walk with him; they moved in silence, tide lapping near their feet, the Golden Gate Bridge to their back, scattered car lights moving slowly across it. To their left was a rocky hillside; above them, the sprawling stucco houses of Seacliff overlooked the water, much as Terri imagined an Italian hill town. Paget did not seem to notice; he was silent for a long time, and when he began to speak, he gazed at the sand in front of him.

He talked for perhaps an hour.

He told her everything. His voice was uninflected, yet unsparing of himself or anyone else. When he had finished, they had turned back toward the Golden Gate, and Terri was exhausted.

‘What will you do?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’ He paused. ‘It’s like something’s broken. I don’t even know where to start.’

Terri watched him for a moment. ‘It’s so unfair, Chris. I feel that for you.’

‘Carlo?’

‘Everything.’

Paget gave a tired shrug. ‘Carlo doesn’t know,’ he said. ‘If I’m looking for perfect justice, I suppose I’ll have to look somewhere else. Mary seems to have that particular market cornered.’

Terri moved closer. ‘She
is
his mother, Chris. When a parent isn’t around, kids invent a person who makes them feel better about that. I think that’s what Carlo must have done with Mary.’

Paget’s repeated shrug seemed the only way he had to slough off feeling. ‘That’s how God made it big, I guess – by not being seen. So why not Mary?’

He was trying to sound fatalistic, Terri knew, but his voice had a weary undertone of bitterness. She waited him out.

‘It’s eight years of questions,’ he said finally. ‘We never really talked about his mother, or
why
he was living with me. Tonight was like a dam bursting.’ He paused, then, his voice lower, as if he was talking to himself. ‘Christ, what a fool I was.’

Terri moved closer to him. ‘But there’s nothing you can do about the past.’ Her own voice grew quieter. ‘Just as I wish I’d never found the tapes but know there’s nothing I can do now. Just as there’s nothing
you
can do to put off tomorrow.’

Paget looked away. ‘God, I wish there were.’

‘But there isn’t.’ She paused again. ‘You’re going to have to deal with Carlo, and with Mary. But first you’re going to have to keep on living with yourself. And whatever you do tomorrow will be part of that.’

He turned away from her, toward the ocean. It was a gesture not of dismissal but of thought. Terri watched him stand there, framed by moonlight and black water. When she felt it was time, she moved beside him.

‘You’ve been a lawyer for almost twenty years,’ she said. ‘Lawyers protect their clients.’

Paget did not turn. ‘I wasn’t her lawyer,’ he replied, ‘when I lied to the Senate.’

‘But you are now, Chris. Mary may not have told Caroline the truth, but it’s at least as close to the truth as Marnie’s version.’ She paused. ‘Whatever Mary did to Ransom, it wasn’t murder. She was battered, degraded, and deeply frightened – close to breaking, it seems. What she did was somewhere between manslaughter and self-defense, and I doubt even Mary can know which one.’ Her voice gained intensity. ‘Think of her as just a client, if you can. How much does a woman have to take before killing a man in self-defense? Does she have to know to a moral certainty that he would
kill
her? For
me
, what he had already done, and what he was threatening to do, is more than enough.’

‘She
lied
, Terri. As always.’

Terri waited. ‘Do you mean that she lied to Caroline,’ she said, ‘or lied to you? Because if her sin for these purposes is that she lied to protect herself in court, you’d be the first to say that clients do that all the time. It’s only
your
sin if you were part of it.’

‘You know I wasn’t.’

Terri nodded. ‘Then there’s no problem of ethics here. You can argue the evidence. Or Sharpe’s lack of evidence.’

‘And cover for Mary again.’

‘You can avoid that, Chris, by pulling out. You’ve got the right. But if you do, she won’t just lose in
this
hearing. People will believe you’re withdrawing because she’s guilty of murder.’ Terri paused again, then finished quietly: ‘And as much as I dislike her, I don’t think she is.’

‘It’s a little hard for me to care.’