Authors: William Lashner
Julia and Daniel Rose’s one-room apartment above the salubrious atmosphere of Tommy’s High Ball: one unmade bed, one listing crib, a hot plate, a small refrigerator, a portable television, the faint smell of vomit. In the closet, above the piles of dirty clothes and dirty plastic toys, hung men’s pants, men’s shirts, a leather jacket twice Julia’s size. Beside the closet was a small bathroom with a moldy shower stall. Not exactly the Ritz.
“How long has Randy lived here with you, Julia?” said Isabel.
“Off and on for about six months,” said Julia Rose.
“Why did you lie to us and say Randy wasn’t here anymore?”
“He said that because of his record, and his time in the pen, you might take Daniel away if you knew we was together.”
“We don’t want to take Daniel away from you, Julia. We only want you to take care of him as well as you are able.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” said Julia defensively. “And Randy helps. He’s fine with Daniel. They get along real good. He takes him to the park, out to McDonald’s. Randy’s the closest thing Daniel’s ever had to a father. And he didn’t like it, you sitting outside spying on him, Mr. Carl. He didn’t like that at all.”
“I just gave Randy a lift to work, Julia. And I only did it because I wanted to find the truth, and we weren’t getting it from you. But I was impressed with him all the same. He gets up every day, goes to work, works hard. I admire the hell out of that. I agree with you, the best thing for Daniel would be to have a father in the household.”
“Okay,” she said.
But it wasn’t okay, that we were there, that she had to answer to us, none of it was okay, and her sullen disposition let us know it clearly. She sat on the unmade bed, holding Daniel like a baby. Daniel looked up at me with big red eyes.
We had knocked on her door unannounced. That had been my clever idea, the only way, I assumed, we could be sure that Julia wouldn’t bolt before we arrived, the only way we could check out Daniel’s living conditions. We had entered the apartment like G-men, sniffing around, scanning it for evidence of a crime, and now we were standing there, in our suits, standing because there was no place to sit, standing as emissaries from a system that had somehow already failed this woman and her child. When first we showed, it had felt like we were being proactive, but now the unannounced visit felt presumptuous and creepy. Yes, I represented the little boy, yes, Isabel was just trying to be sure the child was cared for properly, yes, all of this was sanctioned by the court. But still I had to wonder what the hell I, a man who had no children, no experience working with children, who, to be honest, didn’t even like the little smackers, what the hell I was doing here, judging the fitness of this hole they lived in, which was the most Julia could afford, judging her fitness to be a parent, when it seemed she actually was trying to do her best.
“How are the parenting classes going?” said Isabel.
“Good. Really good. I’m learning a lot.”
“You missed Tuesday.”
“Daniel had a fever.”
“How is he today?” Isabel stepped over to my client and put her hand on his forehead. “He feels all right. Did you take him to a doctor?”
“No. It was just a fever.”
“How do you feel, Daniel?” said Isabel.
Daniel didn’t answer, he just tucked his head into his mother’s shoulder.
“Has he been crying much?” said Isabel.
“Some,” said Julia. “He’s been having trouble sleeping.”
“Does Daniel sleep in there?” said Isabel, indicating the crib.
“Yes, or in our bed if he’s crying.”
“With you and Randy?” I said.
“With me,” said Julia, sticking out her chin.
“He might have an ear infection,” said Isabel. “You need to get that checked out, Julia. You have to take him to the doctor.”
“There’s a copay at the clinic.”
“Did you enroll him in the program I told you about?”
“Not yet.”
“I brought some of the paperwork. We can fill out most of it today. But it has to get finished, Julia. These are things you have to do to properly take care of your son.”
“I have an idea,” I said. Daniel picked his head up and stared at me. I tried to put some false excitement in my voice. “While you guys go over the paperwork and get all the documents filled out, why don’t I take Daniel over to the park?”
Julia looked down at her son, Daniel buried his head in her shoulder.
“Sure,” said Julia, pushing him away. “That would be a big help.”
It was just two blocks down from the apartment, a beat city park, surrounded by a metal fence. Black blistered rubber was set beneath a rusted jungle gym and a dented slide. Empty beer cans were strewn about the cement benches that surrounded the play equipment, a balled-up McDonald’s bag, shards of green glass. It was desolate and ugly, but still, when Daniel approached it, after a slow silent trudge beside me, he couldn’t help himself from breaking into a trot and then a run.
He jumped onto the rubber strap that served as a seat on the swing set. He grabbed the chains and said, “Push.”
I pushed lightly.
“Harder,” he said.
I pushed only a little bit harder, unsure of the government-approved safe pushing speeds for four-year-olds on rickety swing sets.
“Harder,” he ordered.
I complied, and as he reached the pinnacle of his flight, he let out a squeal that told me I was doing it right.
After the swing he clambered over the jungle gym and slid down the slide and rode the bouncy woodpecker. I sat on one of the benches and watched. He went from apparatus to apparatus with a great seriousness, never smiling, giving me the eye now and then but continuing on his rounds, purposely avoiding me.
Eventually he tired and sat down on a different bench, his legs dangling, his Velcro sneakers swinging. I stood, ambled over, sat beside him. He slid away a bit but stayed on the bench.
“How’s it going, Daniel?” I said.
He shrugged.
“Do you remember who I am? My name is Victor. I’m the lawyer. I’m here to help you. Do you remember that?”
“Mommy says I don’t need no help.”
“Any help, and I hope she’s right. You were great on that jungle gym. You were like Tarzan out there.”
“Who’s Tarzan?”
“The king of the jungle gym. You don’t know Tarzan?”
He shook his head.
“He was a kid, really a baby, that was flying in a plane with his parents. They were flying over the jungle when the plane went down, bang. Everyone was lost but the baby, alone in the jungle. Luckily for the baby, it was found by a family of apes, and the apes decided to take care of this little baby. So they fed him and cared for him, and the boy grew up playing with all the animals and swinging on vines. They called him the king of the jungle.”
“That sounds like fun, swinging on vines.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“What’s a vine?”
“Like a rope with leaves. I met Randy. Remember we talked about him before?”
Daniel nodded.
“You still like him?”
He shrugged.
“He doesn’t hurt you, does he?”
He shook his head and then said, “What happened to the mommy and daddy in the plane?”
“Tarzan’s mommy and daddy?”
He nodded.
“They died,” I said.
“Oh.”
“What happened to your father?”
“He’s gone.”
“Did he die, too?”
“No. Mommy says he’s someplace called New Jersey. Is there a jungle there?”
“Sure,” I said. “Newark. So it’s just you and Mommy and sometimes Randy in your family, right?”
“And Tanya.”
“Who is Tanya, Daniel?”
“My sister.”
“Is she older or younger than you?”
“Older. And nice. And really pretty. She took care of me all the time, and we watched TV together.”
“But not anymore?”
“No.”
“Where’s Tanya now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where did she go?”
“Someplace. I don’t know.”
“Why did she go someplace?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you miss her?”
“A lot.”
“When did she leave?”
“After Randy came.”
“Okay.”
“He didn’t like her.”
“Do you know why?”
“Because she was Tanya.”
“Okay.”
“Can you find her for me?”
“Is that what you want me to do, Daniel?”
He nodded.
“How are your teeth doing?” I said.
He didn’t answer, instead he pulled his mouth over his teeth so that his lips disappeared.
“Do you know what a dentist is?”
He shook his head.
“A dentist is a doctor who takes care of teeth. I found one to take care of yours. You get to sit in a chair, and there’s this light and nice music, and the doctor looks in your mouth and fixes things. He said he could fix your teeth so you wouldn’t have to hide them all the time.”
“Will it hurt?”
“A little.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“When something’s broken, you have to fix it or it gets broken worse. It’s the same with teeth. This doctor, his name is Dr. Pfeffer, he said he can fix your teeth so they won’t get worse.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Daniel, you have to.”
“No.”
“How about we make a deal?”
“I don’t want to go. I don’t. I don’t.”
“How about this, Daniel? If you go to the dentist, I’ll find your sister.”
“Tanya?”
“Yes. How about that?”
He opened his mouth and rubbed his tongue over the blackened, irregular stubs of his upper teeth.
“He’s a good dentist,” I said. “He has gentle hands.”
“I want to see Tanya.”
“So we have a deal?”
Before he could answer, he swung his head around. I followed his gaze. Julia and Isabel were walking toward the small opening in the gate.
Daniel ran to his mother, buried his head in her thigh.
There was something about Julia that scared me as her son held on to her leg for dear life. She was a pretty woman, and sweet, too, without a hint of violence in her. She would never willfully hurt Daniel, that was clear. But there was something else in her along with the sweetness, a weakness, and it was the weakness that scared me. I had never been a parent, true, but I had been a son, and I knew how a mother’s weakness could slice into a boy’s psyche like a knife. She couldn’t say no, Julia, she couldn’t deny candy or a night bottle to a child whose teeth were rotting before her very eyes. She would rather ignore a problem than deal with it, and if pressed, she would rather run. That’s why she had been avoiding Isabel, running whenever Social Services planned a visit. And that’s what she would do if I started pressing her on her missing daughter. She’d run, and she’d take my client with her.
So when she came through the fence and Daniel ran to her, I didn’t rush forward and start badgering her about her missing daughter, about Tanya, demanding to know what had happened to her, where she had gone, threatening to call the police. No, that’s not what I did, even though it was a struggle to hold myself back. No, what I did instead was smile.
“How was he?” she said as I approached.
“He was terrific,” I said. I tousled his hair. “He’s a great kid. Julia, I spoke to a dentist about Daniel’s teeth. He says you shouldn’t give him a bottle in the crib before he goes to bed.”
“It’s the only way he’ll sleep. He’s been a bad sleeper since he was born.”
“It’s really terrible for the teeth. You need to stop. The dentist also told me you need to have someone examine Daniel.”
“I can’t afford a dentist.”
“This dentist said he’d be willing to look at Daniel and treat him, if he can, and to do it for free.”
I took a card from my jacket pocket, handed it to her. She looked at it, bit her lower lip.
“His name is Dr. Pfeffer,” I said. “His office is in Center City, on Sixteenth Street. He’s waiting for your call. He says if you don’t do something quickly, there might be permanent damage. But he also seemed to think if you let him take care of it right away, let him put caps on the teeth, there’s a good chance that Daniel’s permanent teeth, when they come in, will be fine.”
“Caps?”
“That’s what he says.”
“Daniel won’t go. He’s scared of doctors and won’t let anyone touch his teeth.”
“Oh, he’ll go,” I said. Daniel was looking up at me, fear in his eyes. “We made a deal. Didn’t we, Daniel?”
He nodded.
“What was the deal?” said Julia.
I was about to say that it was between a lawyer and his client and hoped that covered it for her, but then Daniel spoke.
“He promised he’d get me some ice cream,” he said.
I don’t know if that was the moment I fell for my client, but it was certainly the moment I decided I was going to find Tanya Rose. Because with that little covering lie, Daniel had told me all he ever needed to about his plight in this world, and that of his sister, too. He loved his mother, of course he did, what child doesn’t? But even at the tender age of four, he knew he couldn’t trust her completely to take care of him or his sister. With one little covering lie, he told me he wanted me there, wanted me to help. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
“What do you think?” said Isabel as we watched mother and son walk away from us and back to their sad little apartment above Tommy’s High Ball.
“I’m worried about him.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Well, the teeth, for one. We’ll see if she follows through with Dr. Pfeffer.”
“I’ll make sure of it,” said Isabel.
“And then there’s the question about Daniel’s sister.”
“There’s a sister?” She started searching through her file. “I don’t see any indication of a sister.”
“That’s the point,” I said. “I think I need to see the judge.”
We were swamped.
The François Dubé murder trial was coming fast, and there was still way too much to do. Every piece of evidence had to be examined, every piece of testimony offered at the first trial had to be carefully reviewed for weaknesses. The advantage of a retrial is that you have so much information to work with, pretty much the whole of the prosecution’s case is open and available for your delectation. The disadvantage of a retrial is that you have so much information to work with, you can get buried in the details.
We had covered the conference-room table and floor with mounds of documents and files, all the pleadings and motions, all the testimony, all the police reports, all the forensics reports and crime-scene photographs. We had nicknamed the conference room, with its morass of paper, the Dubé Tar Pit, because we found ourselves stuck there all hours of the day as we tried to build some sort of defense. But as Beth and I worked our way through it all, and the shape of what we were up against became clearer, I began to feel uneasy.
“Something’s not right,” I said late one evening in the tar pit. In my hand were two photographs. The first was from the crime scene, it showed the body of Leesa Dubé sprawled across the floor of her bedroom, the walls sprayed with dark drops, the spill of blood like a halo about her head. She was wearing panties and a T-shirt, no rings, no jewelry, fresh out of bed. One arm was spread wide out to the side, the other was bent beneath her body. Her face was almost calm, pale above the bloody gash left by a bullet through her neck. The second photograph was of Leesa Dubé shortly before her murder, eyes bright, her smile dazzling and unforgettable.
“What did you find?” said Beth.
“Nothing, and that’s just it. We’re missing something here.”
“A report Mia Dalton didn’t give us? I thought we received everything.”
“No, nothing like that. But still we’re missing something.” I dropped the photographs, gestured to the piles of paper. “All this stuff is what the prosecution is going to present. The last trial was fought right here, on this battlefield, and François lost.”
“But they don’t have Seamus Dent this time,” said Beth.
“True, but Whitney Robinson said he wasn’t that great a witness. His absence isn’t enough to turn the tide. And remember, even though we get to see all of Mia Dalton’s case, she gets the chance to correct all the mistakes the prosecution made before. Frankly, she’s a better lawyer than her boss.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“I don’t want the fight to be about all this crap,” I said. “I want to change the battlefield. What we need is another suspect. Someone to shoulder the blame. It’s what Whitney said was missing in the first trial.”
“We can argue it was a burglary gone bad.”
“With nothing burgled? Break in, kill a stranger—no rape, just murder—and then run away without so much as grabbing a diamond ring? That won’t fly.”
“What else do we have?”
“Nothing, and that’s the problem. Not a damn thing.”
And I was right, we didn’t have a damn thing. But we did have the bones of something. Velma Takahashi’s apparent guilt. Geoffrey Sunshine’s shifty eyes. The strange story of Seamus Dent’s descent and redemption and death. And then there was the peculiarly coincident contacts of Dr. Pfeffer to Whitney Robinson and Seamus Dent both. I could spend every hour until the trial digging through the piles in the Dubé Tar Pit, but that wouldn’t get me one inch closer to taking those bones and gluing them together and animating some credible creature we could put in front of the jury and blame for Leesa Dubé’s death.
“You know what still puzzles me?” I said. “The stuff missing from François’s apartment that no one could account for.” It was the toys that were playing on my mind. Mrs. Cullen had mentioned toys. What kind of toys? Beanie Babies?
“François told us the landlord sold it off or threw it away,” said Beth.
“That’s what he said, but there was stuff missing even when the police searched his apartment.”
“Why is it important?”
“I don’t know. But it’s a loose end. Our only chance is to find some loose end and pull it until everything unravels.”
“If there was anything there, François would have told us.”
“You think so?”
“Of course.”
“It appears we have differing views of our client.”
“You don’t trust him.”
“And you do.”
She looked at me and there was something in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”
And what I thought just then was “Crap.”
My partner, Elizabeth Derringer, was the type of woman whose beauty couldn’t be captured in a photograph, with a glossy black ponytail and a smear of freckles across her broad cheeks. A picture showed a serious woman with serious glasses, the type that shushed you quiet in the college library. But a photograph couldn’t catch the sharp humor, the abiding sweetness, the romanticism that hid like a virus in her heart. She still believed she could find something in the markets of Istanbul or along the rugged trails in Nepal that she couldn’t find in Philadelphia. Dysentery was all, I explained to her, but still she often mused aloud of traveling the world and finding a richer self. Paying clients would be a surer route, I told her, and when I did, she would smile indulgently, as if I were a sweet little puppy who had just peed on her shoe. I was worried, just then, that her romanticism had gotten the best of her. And I had cause, didn’t I?
“It’s just another case, Beth,” I said softly. “He’s just another defendant.”
“There’s no such thing,” she said.
“You know, Beth,” I said in my best avuncular tone, “it’s hard enough to determine innocence or guilt right after a crime has been committed, but this guy has been in jail—”
“I don’t need a lecture,” she snapped.
“Maybe you do. It is not our job—”
“Don’t, Victor. Please. I know our job. He hasn’t hugged his daughter in three years.”
“It shouldn’t matter.”
“But it does.” She slapped her notebook closed, stood up. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m going home.”
I glanced at my watch, bolted to my feet. “Damn it, I’m late.”
“Hot date with Carol?”
“Hardly,” I said. “It’s with Carol, all right, but tonight is all business.”