Howtown (18 page)

“Yes, go on. I’m listening,” I replied, completing the difficult transition from my private thoughts to this conversation.

“Do you know about S&Ls?”

“Savings and loan associations? Just that a lot of them are failing.”

Peter nodded. “Including one here called Pioneer S&L. The feds are on the verge of taking it over.”

I tried to appear interested. “What does that have to do with Mark?”

“He owns it,” Peter replied. “Not in his own name. He’s got other people fronting for him. The reason it’s going down the tubes is that it made a lot of risky loans, mostly on shopping malls and condos.”

I nodded, waiting for the punch line.

“As it happens, most of those deals involved Windsor Development.”

“I thought Mark was doing well,” I said.

“He was in too much of a hurry to expand,” Peter said. “He put up things that no one wanted to get into and he did it with Pioneer’s money. The worse it got for him, the more ready cash he needed, and the more money he took out of Pioneer.” He tapped the desk. “That’s against the law. The feds call it looting.”

I was beginning to get the picture. “And when Pioneer started failing, the feds came in and took a look at the books.”

“They’re about to run an audit,” he said. “They don’t know what I’ve told you, yet. I got it from reading some very confidential memorandums in a special client file.”

“How did you find it?”

He smiled. “You know how lawyers are, there’s copies of everything if you look hard enough. There was a copy of the file in billing. The way I look at it, Henry, Mark’s not concerned about what happens to Paul. He’s about to have enough on his hands just trying to keep himself out of jail.”

“Poor Mark.”

“Well,” he said, rising heavily, “if someone has framed Paul, this at least eliminates Mark. Hey, did you talk to your corroboration?”

I nodded. “Yes. She saw Paul’s car the day he said he was out taking pictures of her. It backs up his story that the film was switched.”

“Maybe,” he cautioned. “Maybe he had two rolls.”

“Yes, that’s possible, but it’s the kind of coincidence that makes the DA’s case look a little less compelling.”

“True,” he allowed. “So who does that leave?”

“The cops,” I said. “If someone switched the film, it would have had to be Morrow.”

“That’s mighty hard to believe, Henry.”

I shrugged. “Maybe he really wanted to nail Paul on the child molest thing and saw his chance.”

“I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “Cops get cases dismissed on them all the time and they get over it. Unless he had special reason to be interested in the girl. Family friend, maybe.”

“That’s a possibility I hadn’t thought about,” I said, jotting myself a note.

“Listen,” he said, at the doorway, “just out of curiosity, did she tell you why she wouldn’t testify?”

“She said she didn’t want to have to explain to her son that she put his father in jail,” I replied. “I can’t blame her. She’s going to have enough to explain to him as it is.”

He nodded.

“Peter,” I said, “I appreciate your help but I don’t want you to get into trouble around here.”

“I’ll tell you a little secret, Henry. When I was snooping around I found another file, a personnel file. There’s a memo from Clayton to Cummings saying that I don’t seem to be working out. They’re getting ready to fire me, I guess.”

“I’m sorry, Peter.”

“They’ll be doing me a favor.”

After Peter left, I tried calling Elena again, but this time didn’t even get her machine. There was no answer at Ruth Soto’s house, either. Finally, I packed up my papers, called Josh and told him I was on my way.

Josh insisted on taking me to dinner for my birthday so we went off to Old Towne and a French restaurant which he had read about somewhere. Having worked in them from the time he was thirteen, Josh knew something about restaurants and food. At one point he’d considered going to cooking school, but he’d put the idea aside because he didn’t think anyone would hire a chef who was HIV-positive. No one would take the chance that he might accidentally cut himself and bleed into the food. There was a certain logic in this, but it pained me when he imposed limits on himself like that.

He ordered for both of us. Living with him, I’d begun to overcome my indifference to food, but presented with more than two choices I invariably ordered whatever my dining companion was having. Josh diagnosed this as a form of ahedonia, a word he’d picked up from God knows where that purportedly meant an indifference to pleasure.

Over the grilled lamb chops he’d ordered for me, I told him what I had learned about my sister that afternoon. He listened intently, and when I finished said, “Why didn’t she ever tell you?”

“We’re not close,” I replied. The answer sounded inadequate even to me.

“I bet you have secrets you’ve never told her.”

I shrugged. “Being born into my family was like being thrown into an accident. Elena and I went our own ways, no questions asked.”

He sipped some wine. “I’d like to get to know her.”

“So,” I said, “would I.”

Josh left for LA the next morning and, after taking him to the airport, I went to my office. I worked until noon drafting a motion to change the venue of Paul’s trial from Los Robles to San Francisco, the nearest big city. Peter had left me the points and authorities he’d used when he was a DA opposing a similar motion. I was pleasantly surprised at how thorough and well written they were. Criminal law is a courtroom practice, and few of us, on either side of the table, have much talent for the written word.

Motions to change venue are rarely granted since their premise is that pretrial publicity has prejudiced a defendant’s ability to get a fair trial by tainting the pool of prospective jurors. A court must be convinced of the “reasonable likelihood” that this has occurred. It’s a vague standard that gives the court a lot of room in which to move and with my hometown disadvantage I knew I’d have to work doubly hard to box the court in.

I gathered up my notes and went down to Peter’s office. As I walked down the hall, Mark Windsor emerged from Bob Clayton’s office. We hadn’t seen each other since the night we’d talked at the hotel.

“You look pretty official there,” Mark said, with a crinkly smile.

“What’s going on, Mark?” I asked, stopping.

“Just counting my money,” he replied.

“Well, everyone needs a hobby.” I started past him.

“I thought you were going to call me,” he said.

I stopped again and looked at him. Maybe the crinkles around his eyes weren’t good humor but worry. After what Peter had told me, I could imagine Mark had good cause for concern.

“Your brother’s kept me busy,” I said.

“You’ve gotta eat, right? Relax? Come over some night.”

It sounded casual enough but I could hear him struggling to connect.

“I promise.”

“Good. See you later, Hank.”

Peter was at his desk, with a half-eaten sandwich before him, dictating something. He clicked off his tape recorder when I came in. I dropped into a chair and said, “I just ran into Mark.”

Peter nodded. “He’s been here all morning. I think the feds have caught his scent. So how’s the motion going?”

“Great, thanks for your Ps and As. You’re a pretty good lawyer, Peter.”

With a sidewise smile, he said, “Go tell that to Bob.”

“Can you give me some more help on this?” I asked, laying the motion on the desk.

“Just let me cancel my appearance before the Supreme Court,” he replied. “What do you need?”

“I can handle the legal research part but what I need is someone to do some fact gathering to support my argument.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I’d like to know the
Sentinel
’s circulation in the county, both by subscription and at vending machines. Also, I want to know how jurors get drawn around here …”

“Voter registration rolls,” he said.

“What about DMV registration? I want a clear idea of how big the pool is in relation to how many people the
Sentinel
reaches. Also, I’d like some kind of analysis of the amount of coverage that Paul’s case had received in the paper compared to other murders it’s reported in, let’s say, the last eighteen months.”

Peter had been taking notes. He stopped and said, “You’re really serious about this.”

I nodded. “And what about TV and radio coverage? Can we get transcripts or something, and the dates of broadcast? I want to be able to say that there isn’t anyone in Los Robles County who hasn’t heard of Paul Windsor.”

“That doesn’t mean anything if you can’t show possible prejudice,” he pointed out.

“I know that. But look, one thing the court considers is the notoriety of the crime. Here we’ve got a brutal murder plus a connection with pedophilia and a defendant with a famous name. This is not a routine homicide for Los Robles.”

“Let me play the DA,” Peter said. “You can’t say that just because the case involves a couple of child molesters people around here can’t be fair. They’ve heard of McMartin. They’re just as bombarded as everyone else is about abused kids.”

“True,” I allowed, “so here’s my trump card. It’s not just the way the
Sentinel
’s covered the case, it’s how they’ve used it to try to get at Mark Windsor. It’s turned this case into part of its political vendetta against the Windsors on the no-growth issue. Paul’s trial isn’t just about his guilt or innocence, it’s a referendum on big developers in general, and his family in particular.”

“Well, it’s a novel argument,” Peter said. “I don’t know how convincing it is.”

“It’s what I’ve got.”

“So when do you want all this stuff?”

“I’d like to file the motion next Monday. That gives you four days.”

He grinned. “You’re counting the weekend.”

“You mind?”

He looked around his file-littered room and said, “What else do I have to do?”

Back in my own office, I called Ruth Soto. From the way she answered my greeting I knew that she wasn’t happy to hear from me. I didn’t blame her a bit. It was one of those times when it seemed to me that my job consisted of getting people to do what they didn’t want to.

“Have you had a chance to think about what we talked about yesterday?” I asked her.

“I been busy,” she said with schoolgirl surliness. “I don’t remember everything you said.”

“I’m talking about whether you’re willing to testify at Paul’s trial.”

There was silence at her end. “I want to talk to Elena.”

“Have you called her?”

“She don’t answer her phone,” Ruth said. “I’m really busy with school starting, and Carlos …”

“Ruth, the trial won’t be for weeks, at least,” I replied, cutting off her evasions.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice getting faint. “I want to think about it.”

“Okay,” I said, letting it go for now. My appeal to her sense of fairness had evidently failed, and I could understand why. How fairly had Paul treated her? I would have to devise another approach. “I’ll call you tomorrow. If you talk to Elena, tell her …” but I couldn’t think of what I wanted Ruth to tell her. “Tell her I tried calling her, too.”

I put down the phone and contemplated the irony of Paul’s defense lying in the hands of the one person in the world who had the least reason to want to help him. This case seemed to be generating its own peculiar brand of karma.

On the street, a jogger braved the early afternoon heat, heading toward the river on the Parkway. I thought of Ben Vega, and that brought me around to another thread in this mystery, the possibility that the cops had fabricated evidence to convict Paul.

I turned away from the window and considered the pile of documents on my desk generated by the Windsor prosecution. Idly, I flipped through them, coming to the police reports of Paul’s previous arrest for child molestation. I studied the signature of the investigating officer, Dwight Morrow.

Morrow. Was it really a coincidence that he was also the investigator on the McKay case? Ben had told me how angry Morrow’d been when Paul got away the first time. Despite Peter’s defense of him, to me Morrow had the look of a cop who always got his man.

Always? I wondered, as I picked up the phone.

T
HE PHONE RANG JUST AS
I’d finished lacing my brand-new Nikes. “Hi. Ben?”

“Yeah, I’m downstairs in the lobby. It’s real nice running weather.”

I glanced out the window. It was just getting to be dusk.

“Still hot?” I asked.

“Not too bad. It’ll be nice and fresh by the river.”

“Give me five minutes.”

He was downstairs, looking nervously out of place in his black running shorts and Los Robles Police Department singlet. He smiled when I appeared, and I was again struck by the contrast between his heavily muscled body and round, little boy’s face—he looked like he’d stuck his head through one of those muscleman cardboard cutouts.

“You ready, Mr. Rios?”

“If we’re going to parade down River Parkway half-naked,” I said, “you’re going have to stop calling me Mr. Rios. Try Henry.”

“Sure, Henry. Ready?”

It had been months since I’d run. “As ready as I’m going to get.”

We walked the few blocks from the Hyatt to the river’s edge.

“Where’s your friend?” Ben asked abruptly as we approached Old Towne.

I glanced at him, but he looked intently ahead. “Josh? He went back to LA.” I hesitated, then added, “Listen, about that crack he made, Ben. I’m sorry if it embarrassed you.”

“Different strokes for different folks,” he said, with forced nonchalance.

I couldn’t think of an appropriate platitude with which to answer him and we walked on in a faintly uncomfortable silence, stopping when we got to the river.

A bike path went upriver from the newly renovated waterfront to a park about seven miles away. I figured I was good for three.

“Let me stretch,” I said. While he stood watching, I went through my stretching routine waking slumbering joints and muscles. They weren’t gracious about being called back into service, but slowly, and sullenly, they responded. “Okay.”

We started at a slow warmup trot, passing the T-shirt shops and fast-food restaurants that now occupied the brick structures that had been the original city. It was warmish, still, and the air was thick with light the color of honey. Briefly, a motorboat shattered the green surface of the river. Soon we were out of Old Towne and into a wooded area between the river and a levee.