The Disappearance (18 page)

Riva turns to him. “You’re the pro at this, not me. But if I were you, and that was bothering me half as much as it’s bothering you, I’d ask him.”

It’s a sealed envelope, with a warning on the cover:
The opening, reading, examination, or any other use of this document by unauthorized persons will result in criminal penalties.

He’s authorized, Riva isn’t, he’ll share it with her anyway, and with anyone else he needs to share it with, if there’s information in it that has a bearing on his case. Sitting at his desk, he slashes the envelope open. By the time he’s finished reading the first paragraph, he’s starting to shake.

Riva notices. “What’s the matter?”

“Emma Lancaster was pregnant.”

“Oh, no!” She’s as shocked by this information as he is.

This is incredible, he thinks, reading the report. This revelation is going to throw his investigations and his entire defense posture—not that he has one yet—into chaos. A fourteen-year-old girl is carried away willingly (in his mind, he’s almost positive of that now) from her bedroom. It almost certainly had to be by the man she’s been having sex with, who got her pregnant.

This case is going to take a broader path now. He’s going to have to explore Emma Lancaster’s life in much greater depth and detail than he’d planned. Who she was seeing, where she was seeing them, who could have known she was pregnant—did her parents know, for instance? Did her abductor know she was pregnant? Was he the father of her unborn child, who upon hearing of this disaster panicked and killed her?

Fundamentally, this case is no longer merely about defending Joe Allison; its now about Emma Lancaster’s short life, how she lived, and why she died.

So here’s another problem for you, Luke my boy, he thinks to himself. If Joe Allison, your client, was fucking Emma Lancaster, a fourteen-year-old girl, then very likely he’s the one who killed her. What does that mean to you, defending a man who was screwing a girl that young? Where is your moral compass? Do you even have one? And if you do, and he is, what can you do about it, since you’re now his lawyer, until death or the end of this trial do you part?

It’s a warm night, with a southwestern offshore flow bringing unusually high humidity. Riva, cooking the first dinner in their new digs, has thrown all the windows open, and the high, wispy breeze filters through the small house, keeping it cool and comfortable.

Judge De La Guerra has been invited to be the guest of honor. A widower who eats most of his meals at Birnam Wood, his golf club, the judge was happy to accept. He sits in the lone good rental chair and sips one of Riva’s killer margaritas.

Luke, sprawled on the couch, his own large tequila libation in hand, drops the latest bombshell in his mentor’s lap. “Do you think Ray Logan is stupid enough to think this autopsy report would be kept sealed permanently?” he asks.

Without hesitation: “No. Of course not.”

“Then he has to figure Allison’s who knocked her up,” Luke thinks out loud. “Logan could’ve handed the goddamn file over, or at least alerted me to its contents. There is such a thing as professional courtesy.” He thinks further. “We’re going to have to find out if the lab did any DNA testing on her, and if they did, are they going to request that the court have Allison tested. Hair, skin, particles, anything.”

“That would simplify things,” De La Guerra observes.

“There’s no way in hell I’m going to let him get tested,” Luke says. “I’d fight that all the way to the Supreme Court.” Thinking through that, he goes on, “Actually, if they were going to, they would’ve done it by now, I suspect, or at least raised the issue. If whoever screwed her that last day used a rubber, like what they found up there in the gazebo, there wouldn’t be any sperm to provide DNA proof.”

Riva brings dishes of food into the small dining room, which is tucked into a bay window. Outside, the city and ocean glow with the lights of the stars and the moon and a thousand houses. They dig in, piling their plates high with rellenos, rice, beans, tortillas, salad.

The judge beams at Riva. “This is delicious,” he tells her.

“Thank you, kind sir.” A wide smile lights up her face.

“So now my defense strategy is about looking for who shtupped Emma Lancaster,” Luke says, not joining in their bantering. “Assuming it wasn’t Allison.”

“You have to clear up that assumption with your client,” Riva chimes in. “And that it was only one man.”

“That’s true,” Luke says. “Christ, if it were to turn out she was a round-heeled little tramp, that would be brutal.” He pauses. “But good for us,” he has to admit.

“Yes, it would certainly help your defense,” De La Guerra agrees. “An eighth-grade girl from a good family with that kind of background? Damn good cause to raise reasonable doubt.”

“Yep, it would help,” Luke agrees, “and you know what? I would hate to get an acquittal with that kind of defense.”

“Your job is to get your client off, not to judge him or the methods that might be used,” De La Guerra counters.

Luke shakes his head. “No.” He puts his napkin down; he doesn’t want to eat any more now, his stomach can’t handle the conversation. “That’s how the establishment works, how they teach you in law school. But I didn’t come back here after all this time and expose myself to ridicule and snide charges of obliquity to win a case at any cost.” He drinks some of the zinfandel he’s poured with dinner. “I came back here to do the right thing, or nothing at all.”

De La Guerra raises his wine glass in toast. “Hear, hear.”

“Are you mocking me?” He turns and looks at Riva, who’s smothering a smile with the back of her hand. “You too? Are you both mocking me?”

“We love you, Luke. Even when you are chasing crazy dreams.”

“So now I’m Don Quixote? Jousting at windmills?”

“No,” De La Guerra says. “Just a man who’s got religion and doesn’t know how to act on it. But you’re doing a good job of learning,” he adds. He reaches over for the wine bottle. “May I?” he asks Luke.

“Of course.”

He pours a few ounces. Swilling the dark liquid, looking at it up against the overhead ceiling light, he says, “I think you should act on Riva’s suggestion. Confront Allison directly. Ask him if he and Emma were having sex.”

Luke nods. “I can put the question to him, but I know he’ll flat-out deny it, whether it’s the truth or not. He’d be crazy to admit to that.”

“At first glance, maybe, but not necessarily. If he really was her lover, why kill her?”

“Because she found out she was with child and she was going to turn him in as the father,” Luke answers. “Bye-bye career, hello the rest of your life in Soledad.”

“Yes,” De La Guerra responds. “That’s a good, plausible reason. But if he says he wasn’t, if he swears it, wouldn’t you give him the benefit of the doubt, unless you found out otherwise? Everyone else in this county has already tried and convicted Joe Allison of murder,” he reminds Luke. “The least you can do is
not
convict him of something he hasn’t been accused of.”

Joe Allison, three days unshaven, wearing his prison sweats while sitting in the attorney-client holding room, looks at his lawyer like he’s insane. “Sleeping with a fourteen-year-old girl?” he asks incredulously. “Do you really think I’m that sick?”

“It happens thousands of times every day,” Luke says calmly. He’s sitting back, trying to ascertain the truthfulness of Allison’s reaction as it plays out before him. “You hear it all the time. Teachers with students, fathers with daughters. Young girls these days’re much more sexually sophisticated than they’ve ever been.”

He expected his client to deny it, but is there a twinge of guilt there, a millisecond of caught-off-guard-ness before Allison can recover and pull the shade of deceit down over the truth?

He doesn’t think so. This reaction seems genuine and spontaneous.

“I wasn’t sleeping with Emma,” Allison says straight. Then the ramifications of the question sink in. “Are you telling me someone was? Emma had a sex life?”

“Not only did she have a sex life, she was three months pregnant,” Luke says.

Allison rocks back on the molded plastic chair. “That’s … unbelievable!”

“Yep,” Luke agrees.

“So I guess that means you’re going to try and find out who was sleeping with her.”

“Yes.”

“That could be who killed her, right?”

“It’s a strong possibility. The only one I can think of.”

Allison rocks in his chair. “I’ll level with you. She came on to me. Hard. Christ Almighty, she looked like she was sixteen, and acted older.”

“So what exactly
did
you do with her, Joe?”

“I …” Allison is squirming in his seat. “I gave her a few kisses and hugs. You know, like an uncle would.”

Luke shakes his head. “Like an uncle? C’mon, man, what did I warn you? About telling me the truth?”

Allison looks away. “Okay. We made out a couple of times.” Forcefully, he adds, “But that’s all. I did not sleep with her. I did not get her pregnant. And I wasn’t anywhere near her house that night.” He whines: “She initiated it.”

“And you just couldn’t resist. Sounds like she was a seasoned seductress,” Luke says sarcastically.

Allison shakes his head. “She was full of teenage juice, but underneath it all she was an innocent kid, despite everything,” he says sadly. “She was only in the eighth grade.” He calculates in his head. “If she was pregnant, that means she was getting it on even earlier, like thirteen.”

Luke nods. “But not with you,” he challenges Allison, one more time. “Even though the rubbers they found in your place match the ones they found up in the Lancaster’s gazebo.”

“That was a plant,” Allison says. “That’s so obvious it’s pathetic. Ask my girlfriend, Nicole. She’ll tell you I’ve never used that kind.”

Luke gets up. He’s heard enough on this subject from Joe Allison. “I’m planning to.”

Doug Lancaster’s lover, Helena Buchinsky, is the wife of the head of Mason/Dixon Productions, one of the major independent film and television companies in the country. Dark, Rubenesquely voluptuous—she has Armenian, Turkish, Greek, some Czech or Polish in her ancestry—she lies on the deck of her Trancas beach house wearing nothing but a pair of men’s boxer shorts, her body wet with her own perspiration, sun-tan oil, Doug’s sweat. You can smell the reek of sexuality coming from her, not a body smell, a life force.

They made love as soon as Doug drove his Jaguar convertible down the coast highway from Santa Barbara, in the guest bedroom, where they always have sex when they’re at this house, their preferred place of assignation, since the Buchinskys don’t have full-time live-in help here. She won’t make love with him in the bed she shares with her husband (the same rule applies to her primary house in Brentwood, where she and Doug meet rarely, it’s too dangerous), not for moral reasons or to spare her husband some small indignity, however unknown to him, but because she doesn’t want to take the chance of something foreign being left behind that could be found and used against her. Her prenuptial agreement with Ted, her husband of nine years, specifies only a few reasons he can cut her out of her community property and support, should they divorce. Extramarital sex is the main one, and while she and Doug have been lovers for many years, since long before he and Glenna split, she is ever vigilant. She assumes Ted has her watched from time to time; he may even have pictures of her naked with Doug. But the actual act of sexual congress, she makes sure that’s hidden from the world.

Helena knows Doug is worried and preoccupied with the arrest of the man who killed his daughter, and the trial that’s on the distant horizon. She knows everything Doug knows: he confides in her more than he ever confided in Glenna.
You can always talk to the lover better than the mate, she thinks. It’s the same with her and Teddy, they don’t talk about squat.
She knows about the botched bribe. She knows his daughter Emma wasn’t a virgin, that her killer might have been her lover. She knows of Doug’s anger and concern over it, both that it happened and, even worse, now that she’s dead, that the knowledge will become public. And she knows that her lover fears Luke Garrison as an opponent, a man with nothing to lose who for the last three years has lived a life straight out of the ’60s: turn on, tune in, drop out.

“How’re you doing?” she asks. She speaks in a thick New York accent, as street-sounding as Cathy Moriarty, the actress who played Jake LaMotta’s wife in
Raging Bull
and, more recently, Harvey Keitel’s in
Cop Land
. She loves those movies—it’s her old neighborhoods. Cathy’s a friend from way back.

“Good, now,” he says, running the fingers of one hand along the inside of her thigh closest to him.

“That’s good,” she responds, sliding her hand down her leg to cover his, stop its stimulating journey. They’ve had their fuck for the day, it was fine, she doesn’t want to get turned on again. And even though her stretch of beach is private and inaccessible, the deck sheltered with darkly tinted glass walls that you can see out of but not in through, and the house itself tucked into a secluded alcove and elevated from the beach, she’s still careful when they’re outside.

“I mean in general,” she says, “not the last half hour.” She scratches her behind where the sweat’s making it itch. “Get me a Coke, will you?” She points vaguely towards the inside, separated from the deck by open French doors.

Doug, wearing a bathing suit, gets up and pads into the house, reemerging a moment later with a liter of cold Coca-Cola from the refrigerator, an open bottle of Absolut, and a couple of glasses filled with ice. He knows the layout of this house well, he’s been coming here for a long time now. Dropping down next to her, he hands her the Coke and a glass, pours a couple of fingers of vodka into each glass, drinks from his.

“In general …” he says.

“You think he’s gonna investigate.”

He stares at her. She’s in her soothsayer mode, which is usually right on the money.

“
You
,” she says to him. “This lawyer. He’s gonna try to find out what everybody was doing that night, anybody that could’ve had access to your property. That’s how he’s gonna work it for his client, right? See if somebody else could’ve killed Emma. If their time can’t be accounted for,” she adds, staring at him.