The Death of Friends (19 page)

I grabbed a metal handle and pulled. The door opened. “Just like that? Where’s the security?”

“Here,” Freeman said, pointing to a device in the wall which had the dimensions and appearance of a bathroom mirror with a metal shelf at the bottom of it. Smoked glass covered both the mirrorlike rectangle on the wall and the shelf. “There’s a camera behind the glass that’s supposed to let the marshals upstairs see who’s down here. Then you put your ID card here,” he continued, indicating the shelf. “A scanner reads your card and they match you up with your picture and buzz you in through the doors. Problem is, the camera’s broken.”

“In the earthquake?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “If they were using it before the quake, they’d have fixed it up by now. And look how the door sticks.”

I let the door drop. It wedged slightly against the other door. “So?”

“Defeats the purpose of the buzzer,” he said. “I’d say this system broke down before the quake and they didn’t have the money to fix it.”

“So basically,” I said, “anyone who knows about this entrance can walk into the courthouse?”

“That’s about the size of it,” he said. “Of course, the only people who are going to know about it are the people who are supposed to be down here in the first place. Employees. The public entrance is upstairs on the street. I guess that’s why they figured they could let this go.” He opened the door. “After you?”

The doors opened to a wide corridor that led to another door marked “Stairs.” It was not locked. Two short flights of stairs and another door and we found ourselves on the ground floor of the courthouse.

“Zack said Chris told him if he was stopped by a security guard to tell him that he was going to see Chris,” I said. “That implies there are guards. Are there?”

“Yeah,” Freeman said, as he led us around the corner to a bank of elevators. “Down there.”

The courthouse occupied nearly an entire block and its scale was, accordingly, gargantuan. At the end of the wide corridor from where we were standing, about half the distance of a football field, a blue-coated security guard was sitting at a desk at the front entrance of the courthouse, his back to us. We could’ve exploded grenades without attracting his attention. Freeman pressed the elevator button and the door slid open. We boarded the elevator. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds. “Which floor?”

“Five,” I said.

The fifth floor was empty. The polished linoleum was still damp from mopping and the big brass lights blazed overhead. Alternating double and single doors ran the length of the walls, which were faced with marble. The double doors were the public entrances into the courtrooms and each was marked in gold lettering with the number of the courtroom and the judge who presided therein. The single doors were not marked. They were the private entrances into the judges’ chambers, which were located behind the courtrooms. The place was as still as a mausoleum as we made our way down the hall past the doors to Chris’s courtroom, which still bore his name, to the unmarked door that led to his chambers. I grabbed the doorknob confidently but this time the door did not yield.

“What do you know,” I said, jiggling the knob. “A lock that actually works.”

“American Express,” Freeman said, slipping a credit card between the frame and the door. “Don’t leave home without it.”

I heard a click and then he pulled the door open.

“Nice work,” I said. “Of course, Chris was expecting Zack, so this door would’ve been unlocked.”

We found ourselves in a dark hallway. I ran my hand along the wall until I found the light switch and flipped it on. We walked to the end of the hall where it intersected another, shorter, corridor which led, in either direction, to a door. Chris’s name was visible on the right-hand door. Freeman did his credit card trick on it and got us inside. I clicked the light on. The surfaces of the room were covered with the fine black powder used by the cops to lift prints. There was a dark stain on the carpet beside the desk. All of Chris’s personal items had been stripped from the room. I glanced into the small bathroom; even his hand towels had been removed. For the first time, I felt spooked.

“Ten minutes,” Freeman said, glancing at his watch.

“Huh?”

“It took us ten minutes to get up here from the garage.”

“And no one saw us,” I said. “How is that possible?”

Freeman perched at the edge of the desk. “A couple of days ago I called the court administrator and said I ran a private security company and I was interested in bidding for this job, seeing that a judge had been knocked off,” he said. “He’s the one who told me about all the cutbacks because of the budget. When I asked him what precautions he was taking since the murder, he said he issued a memo warning people against working in the building after six, when it closes to the public. Otherwise, they’ve got five guards patrolling all ten floors from six to midnight.”

“And after midnight?”

He smiled. “They lock up and go home.”

“How often are the patrols?”

“Supposedly on the hour,” he said.

“Amazing,” I said. “This place is wide open.”

At that moment, I heard footsteps in the hall.

Freeman glanced at his watch. “It’s a quarter to. They’re early.”

“Ten floors and they pick on us,” I said, hitting the light switch in the room. “Quick, into the bathroom.”

I left the bathroom door open a crack and stood back so that, while I was in the darkness, a sliver of the outer room was visible to me. Someone entered the chambers and turned the light on. I glimpsed a blue-clad back as the guard passed in front of the bathroom door. I was aware that both Freeman and I had stopped breathing. I ran through the story I would tell if we were discovered, but then he passed in front of the door again, turned the light out and left. I waited another moment, until I could no longer hear his footsteps, before I let us out of the bathroom.

“They don’t exactly break their necks around here to secure the place,” Freeman observed.

“No,” I agreed, “but why would they? A courthouse must run pretty low on the list of potential crime targets.”

“Except that this happened,” he said, indicating the rusty stain on the carpet.

“True,” I said, “but it’s random crime you guard against, and Chris’s murder wasn’t random.”

“We through here?” Freeman asked. “This case gives me the willies.”

I was standing at the door, facing Chris’s desk, trying to imagine what Zack had seen when he entered the room that night. A body on the ground, blood, the pointed end of the obelisk embedded in the back of Chris’s skull. Seeing the room, remembering his description, something flickered through my head, not quite a thought, not quite a memory, and it came out of my mouth as, “Someone saw him.”

Freeman said, “What?”

“Nothing,” I said, because I didn’t understand myself what I meant. “You’re right. It’s creepy. Let’s get out of here.”

We got out of the building undetected. Back in the garage, I walked Freeman to his car.

“Want a lift?” he asked.

“No, I’m just out on the street. Have you had any luck finding out whether Chris had dinner with someone the night he was killed?”

He shook his head. “I got his clerk to give me the names of his five favorite restaurants, but I haven’t finished checking them out.”

“What about the Epicenter?” I asked.

“It’s on my list,” he said.

“Have you talked to Joey Chandler?”

“Tried to,” he grunted. “I did like you suggested and went out to USC and caught him between classes. He wanted to know if I was the police and when I told him I wasn’t, he said he didn’t have to talk to me. Period.”

“So we still don’t know if he has an alibi or not?”

“Nope,” he agreed.

“And McBeth? What did you find out about her?”

“She’s a detective two,” he said, “and she got there in record time.”

“What’s her reputation?”

“She’s a black woman on the fast track,” he said. “What do you think? Her brothers in blue figure she’s an affirmative action baby and they don’t like that. Plus, she’s cozy with the chief and you know how most of the rank-and-file feel about him.”

I nodded. The current chief was a black man brought in from the outside after Darryl Gates had been forced to resign following the Rodney King fiasco. He was deeply unpopular, particularly with white and Latino officers who accused him of favoring African-Americans. Relationships between those groups had deteriorated to the point that the black police officer association had brought a civil-rights action against the police union in federal court.

“What about her work? Is she a corner-cutter?”

“She’s ambitious,” he said. “Ambition affects different people in different ways. Some get extra-careful, some fudge a little.”

“And McBeth?”

“No major beefs there, but you know that there’s people laying in wait.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and this is a big case for her.”

Freeman grinned. “I’d hate to be the guy that brought a sister down.”

“I could give this piece of the investigation to someone else.”

“Screw it,” he said, lighting a Kool. “I never claimed to be politically correct.”

“No,” I said, “that’s my job.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “You’re kind of a poster child for the politically correct, aren’t you?”

“Keep in touch,” I said. He got into his car and gunned his way out of the lot.

That night, I had a dream. In the dream, I found myself in the garage. It was dark and empty and as I stood there it seemed to close in on me until, in a panic, I started searching for a way out. In the distance, I saw a door. The door was cracked open enough to see there was light on the other side. I walked toward it, feeling the darkness tighten around me. I reached the door, but when I raised my hand to pull it open, something stopped me, a noise coming from the other side. It was a squishy sound, like the sound of something trying to pull itself out of the mud. I knelt down and peered through the crack and saw Chris Chandler sprawled on the floor while a man knelt over him and slammed a marble obelisk into the back of his head, making the soft, muddy noise I had heard. The man’s back was to me and I could see nothing of his face. Jets of blood sprayed the walls. I recoiled and bumped into someone who had come in the darkness behind me. I turned and looked. It was Joey Chandler.

The next morning, as I was still puzzling over the meaning of the dream, the phone rang. I picked it up and before I could speak, a woman said, “Please hold for Joseph Kimball.”

A moment later, Chris’s father-in-law, Bay’s father and one of the most powerful lawyers in the city was saying, “Henry? Joe Kimball here. I think we need to talk.”

He made it sound as if we chatted regularly when, in fact, I had probably spoken to him a dozen times in twenty years.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Kimball?”

“Your investigator was out at USC talking to my grandson.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m representing the man accused of murdering Chris.”

“So I’m given to understand,” he said, with faint but unmistakable distaste. “I don’t know what possible light Joey can shed on your defense of this man.”

“If he’d talked to my investigator it would’ve become apparent.”

There was a pause. “You know, my daughter asked me to call you because she’s too angry to speak to you herself.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I don’t mean to hurt her any further, but I don’t believe my client killed Chris and I’m obliged to pursue every possible avenue of defense.”

“And which avenue takes you to my grandson?”

“This is not something I want to discuss on the phone,” I replied.

Another pause. “I see. Could you come to my office tomorrow morning? Say, eleven.”

“That will be fine,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “See you then.”

I put the phone down. Joe Kimball was out of the reach of most mortals. He didn’t so much practice law as trade favors, and they were the kind of favors for which rules were bent and formalities overlooked. He wouldn’t have called unless he was ready to deal, and he made the kind of offers that one could not refuse.

The elevator deposited me at Kimball’s law offices on the twenty-third floor of the Wells Fargo Building. The windows of the foyer looked out upon the palm-tree-dotted, sun-baked, polyglot sprawl that was Los Angeles. The room’s furnishings evoked a different world, with its dark woods, deep carpeting and eighteenth-century ancestor portraits, as if Kimball’s firm consisted of solicitous pin-striped-suited gentlemen who spent their days revising codicils for elderly widows. In fact, however, Kimball & Casey employed four hundred lawyers in a half-dozen offices across the state working tirelessly on behalf of banks, big businesses and the handful of exceedingly rich individuals who could afford Kimball’s hourly rates.

This was the world Chris had inhabited before he became a judge. Joe Kimball had taken to him like a son and his rise through the firm had been meteoric and, he liked to point out, merited. Still, as Kimball’s son-in-law, he had been something of an heir apparent and he had been treated as such by the other partners and the young associates who fought for his attention. He’d enjoyed that, just as he’d enjoyed the trappings of his success. More than the pleasure he got from them, they were proof that he’d made the right decision when he’d married Bay. He was right that, had he been openly gay, he would never have achieved the same level of success in the clubby culture of the city’s ruling class. I never saw that it was the worth of sacrifice. There’s a line from
A Man for All Seasons,
near the end of the play, when the protagonist, Sir Thomas More, remarks to a man who has perjured himself and sealed More’s doom in exchange for the governorship of Wales that it profited a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, “but for Wales?” That summed up my feelings about Chris’s membership in this particular club.

“Mr. Kimball will see you now,” the receptionist murmured. “His office is at the end of the hall.”

The first time I laid eyes on Joe Kimball, when I was still a law student, I’d christened him, privately, the silver man. His hair was silver, as were his gray eyes in a certain light, and he was wearing a beautifully cut silvery-gray suit. As he rose from behind his desk to greet me, he was still silvery and smooth, though I realized he must now be in his late sixties or early seventies. Since it was Saturday he wore khakis and a blue blazer over a pink polo shirt, but even casually dressed he had the air of a man accustomed to deference. I recognized in his appearance the jocular masculinity that prevails among the men of the old rich, for whom pink is an amusing color for men’s shirts but homosexuality is gender treason.