Eyes of a Child (30 page)

It was that, strangely, which made her angry. ‘I don't have that many suits, Inspector. And I don't have
any
with gunshot residue, blood spatters, or traces of cerebral cortex on the hemline. I'd like you to leave that here.'

The crime lab guy turned to Lynch. When Lynch gave him a querying look, the man pointed to a round spot on the lapel.

‘Ketchup,' Terri said disgustedly. ‘From McDonald's. Elena spilled it when she was sitting in my lap.'

Lynch shrugged. ‘Got to check it out, that's all.'

Terri stared at him. ‘I'm sure you've been to McDonald's. Why don't you just lick it?'

Lynch shook his head, as if disappointed by how hostile Terri seemed. Ignoring him, she began to read the warrant. It told her, as it was designed to, nothing at all. Nor did Lynch say anything much before he left, taking with him two crime lab cops, three evidence bags of rug fibers, a woman's gray suit, and the tape from her answering machine. It was the last which reminded Terri that she could not call Chris to warn him.

Chapter
9

When Paget arrived home, still dressed in tennis clothes and sunglasses, there were two squad cars in the driveway, and Carlo was waiting for him on the front porch. His face was pale; the door was open behind him, and Paget heard voices coming from inside. Carlo held some papers.

‘Monk?' Paget asked under his breath. When Carlo nodded, Paget took the warrant from his hand. It allowed a broad search; as always, it did not explain the basis on which the police asserted that there was ‘probable cause' to comb Paget's home for evidence in the death of Ricardo Arias.

‘I tried to keep them out,' Carlo murmured. ‘One of the cops grabbed my arm and told me to stay in one place and be quiet.'

His tone was shaken and embarrassed. Paget paused to touch his shoulder.

‘There was nothing you could do,' he said reassuringly, and stalked into his house in search of Monk.

A red-haired cop was standing in Paget's library, peering into his fireplace. Carlo's childhood games had been pulled out of their cabinet and turned upside down: Monopoly money and playing cards were strewn across the Persian rug. To Paget, it was a violation of the life he had shared with his son; his rage was so deep that he found it difficult to think.

‘Where's Monk?' he demanded.

The cop turned to him, surprised. ‘You're not supposed to be in here.'

‘I
live
here,' Paget snapped. ‘I asked where Monk was.'

The cop's youthful face turned cold. ‘You'll have to sit on the porch, sir. Unless you want me to cuff you.'

Paget tilted his head. ‘Are you aware that I'm a lawyer?'

The cop shrugged his contempt: the police, Paget knew, often considered criminal lawyers to be as dirty as their clients, cynical profiteers in a conspiracy to break the law. To tear apart the house of a wealthy defense lawyer was more than a duty; it was a deeply satisfying act of class warfare. When Paget did not move, the cop took the handcuffs off his belt and started toward him.

‘Because,' Paget said coolly, ‘your warrant is fucked up. So before you do something truly stupid, go find someone who's capable of understanding why.'

Paget's voice was tight; maintaining calm seemed to cost him a great deal. But the cop had stopped halfway across the room, the first flicker of hesitation in his eyes. ‘I'll give you a clue,' Paget continued. ‘When you find Charles Monk, take him aside and whisper the words “Special Master” in his ear. He'll be quite impressed with your insight.'

The cop flushed at Paget's tone of contempt; the stain on his face emphasized freckles, making him look like a teenager out of his depth. Like Carlo, just moments before.

‘You wait right here,' the cop ordered, and went upstairs. The petty satisfaction Paget felt vanished abruptly: Monk was prowling through his bedroom, he knew, with special attention to his clothes and shoes.

Suddenly Paget heard the voice of his housekeeper.

Walking to the living room, he saw the dark-haired Cecilia, a Nicaraguan woman with haunted eyes and a husband who had been murdered by guerrillas. She sat beneath the Matisse print of a dancer, warily answering the questions of a plainclothes detective with a tape machine. The sense of his own impotence hit Paget with a rush: the cops could ask what they wanted of whomever they wanted, take whatever they wanted, and Paget could do nothing but apologize to Cecilia.

As he walked across the living room, the detective turned to him. ‘I'm sorry,' Paget said to Cecilia. ‘But this will be over soon.'

She looked up at him with a look of fear and shame; in the depths of her soul, she knew that authority had no limits. The detective, a brown-haired man with a brush cut and sad eyes, said to Paget, ‘You'll have to go outside.'

‘Oh, I'm waiting here,' Paget said. ‘For the Special Master.'

Eyeing Paget with a look of wary thought, the man pulled some glasses out of his pocket, as if about to read the fine print on a contract. Paget looked past him to Cecilia. ‘Tell them whatever they want,' he said softly. ‘Nothing you say can hurt me.'

Paget felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. Turning, he discovered Monk, with the young cop next to him.

‘I told him not to move,' the cop told Monk.

Please, the cop's tone said, bust this asshole. Paget smiled at him. ‘There are more games in the library. Carlo used to like the one called Masterpiece.' He shrugged. ‘Of course, you'd have to know something about art.'

Monk stepped between them; something in his yellow-brown eyes suggested that he had understood Paget's anger. ‘Are there any legal files in the library?' he asked Paget.

‘No.'

He addressed the young cop. ‘Finish the library, then. And check with me before you do anything else.'

Monk's voice, calm and professional, suggested that Paget's sarcasm was beneath the young cop's notice. The cop's face relaxed a little, and then he left the room.

Monk folded his arms. ‘You shouldn't do that,' he remarked to Paget.

It was odd; Monk's invasion of Paget's home seemed to bind them in a kind of intimacy, within which Monk could advise Paget on how to accept this new reality. Paget shrugged again. ‘What difference would it make, Charles? You going to go easier on me?'

‘Nope.' Monk peered at him. ‘You keep files here?'

Paget nodded. ‘So let's review where we are. To inspect legal files, you need a Special Master to screen them for privileged materials. You haven't got one, or the warrant would have said so.'

‘True,' Monk said calmly. ‘But if the lawyer in question is a target of the inquiry, you don't need one.'

Paget stared at him. ‘Am I a target? If you could justify that, you'd have enough to arrest me for murder. Which you damn well don't, or I'd be downtown right now.' He paused. ‘The D.A. screwed up.'

Monk appraised him. ‘Even if you were right,' he said slowly, ‘Just tell me where your files are, and we won't look at them. 'Cause I don't give a damn about files.'

But Paget was determined to eke out this small victory. ‘It won't work – they're mixed in with other stuff. Besides, I bring work home at night, and sometimes I forget where I put my papers. So wherever you go,
I
go. Or you don't go anywhere.'

Monk was silent. Paget could follow his calculations: Paget might be playing games with him, but by going through the wrong papers, Monk could risk suppression of the evidence he did obtain. Paget guessed that he was wondering if, in his unsettled state of mind, Paget might betray some piece of evidence that concerned him or make an unguarded remark.

‘Where have you been so far?' Paget asked.

‘Just your bedroom.'

‘Then let me speak to Carlo, and we can go back upstairs. But the deal is that we take it a room at a time, with me present. Anyone who isn't with us waits outside the house.'

Monk gazed past him at Cecilia and at the plainclothesman. ‘You about through?' he asked the man.

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Then you can pack up your stuff and leave. I'll do the rest.'

Paget turned and went to the porch. It was perhaps five o'clock; Carlo was on the steps, sitting in the shadow of the incongruous palm tree that, when he was seven, he had loved so much that he begged Paget to buy the house.

Paget sat down next to him. ‘Sorry,' he said softly.

When Carlo turned to him, Paget was startled to see that his eyes were moist. ‘This scares me, Dad.'

Paget touched his shoulder. ‘It's hard to realize that they can do this to you. But what they're looking for is evidence of some crime. There's nothing to find here.'

Carlo clasped his hands. He looked like a young boy holding on tight; for his son's sake, it was all Paget could do not to hug him.

‘Didn't you and Katie have plans?' Paget asked. ‘I remember something about a movie.'

Carlo gave a listless shrug. Suddenly, desperately, Paget did not wish for him to be here when the cops tore apart their home. He took some money from his wallet. ‘Here,' he told Carlo. ‘Take Katie to dinner. Don't let Monk ruin
her
night too.'

Carlo shook his head. ‘I just want to stick around.'

‘There's nothing you can do. I've got to deal with the cops, and they won't even let you back inside.' He squeezed his son's shoulder. ‘After dinner, go see a movie. By the time it's over, we'll have our house back.'

Carlo turned to him, hesitant. ‘Please, son,' Paget said quietly.

Carlo scanned his face more closely; in that moment, Paget saw him understand how much this pained his father. He stood, still looking at Paget, unsure of what to say. ‘Call me,' Paget told him, ‘if you're going to be past ten or so.'

It made Carlo smile a little. ‘Ten-thirty,' he said, and walked down the steps to his car.

Turning, Paget encountered Cecilia in the doorway. With mingled embarrassment and fear for him, she looked into Paget's face. ‘They ask me to leave,' she explained. ‘But I can come back later, Chris. To help clean up.'

To hear his name pronounced ‘crease,' as Cecilia spoke it, sometimes made Paget smile inside. It did not make him smile now: in Cecilia's mind, the America where Paget lived had been a safer place than the Nicaragua where her husband had died, and no amount of explaining would change her first instinctive reaction to what the police would leave behind.

Paget shook his head. ‘Go home, CiCi. Read to the children. Tomorrow, if I need it, you can help me.'

He squeezed her hand and went inside.

They were already in his bedroom. Monk had permitted the young cop to stay; when Paget entered, he had taken a pair of Terri's panties from the nightstand on her side of the bed and was holding them to the light. He waited until Paget saw him and then, as Monk started in on Paget's closet, turned the drawer of the nightstand upside down and spilled Terri's perfume bottles and diaphragm onto Paget's bed.

An hour after sunset, Paget sat in the dining room amid the ruins of his home, drinking Courvoisier from a snifter Monk had left out on the table. At his feet were broken pieces of his grandmother Kenyon's china serving platter, a gift at her wedding eighty years before: the young cop had knocked it off the china cabinet and, when Paget turned at the sound, blandly apologized for his clumsiness.

It was the last room they had reached. By then the house was a wreck: Paget's and Carlo's drawers overturned; clothes strewn on the carpet; books tossed about like refuse, and silverware scattered on the kitchen floor. Paget had expected this: from his own clients' experience, he knew that the police never picked up what they did not take.

They had taken very little, mostly from Paget's bedroom. Three gray suits, to check for bloodstains or tracesof Ricardo Arias's hair or bone or brain matter. Several pairs of shoes, to inspect for fibers from Richie's rug. A checkbook register that might reflect the purchase of a Smith & Wesson older than his grandmother's broken china. All that Paget had expected; only when Monk demanded the keys to Paget's Jaguar convertible, explaining that the crime lab people would return it in a week or so, did Paget notice that the last item on the warrant called for the impoundment of his car.

The crime lab, the warrant stated, would need to check the car under ultraviolet light. Paget watched the young cop drive it away; it seemed to Paget that he had stopped at the head of the driveway, despite the absence of any traffic, and gazed at Paget in the rearview mirror.

When the police had left at last, Paget went to close his empty garage. The block that had formerly hidden the leather-bound journal was tossed to one side; carefully, Paget replaced it.

They had found nothing, he knew, in the library.

Now he sat alone in the dining room.

A few moments before, Terri had called for the second time: she had said just enough to tell him that she, too, had been searched. But she could not come to him, nor he to her. Rosa was unable to watch Elena that evening, and Paget had a house to make less ravaged before his son returned.

Looking around him at the mess, he took the last warm swallow of brandy.

His run for the Senate was in serious trouble. Tomorrow he would think about that; it seemed a small thing now.

Why, he wondered, had Monk chosen suits that were gray?

He went to the kitchen, threaded his way through the pots and pans on the floor, and picked up the telephone.

Outside, through his windows, the city dropped toward the bay, a smooth oval of blackness, and the lights of Marin County twinkled in the hills beyond. The telephone he had dialed rasped in his ear.