Lion Plays Rough

Lion Plays Rough

Lion Plays Rough

A Leo Maxwell Mystery

Lachlan Smith

The Mysterious Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

New York

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents
are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual
events, entities, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Lachlan Smith

Jacket design by Marc Cohen/MJC Design; Jacket photographs: street scene by Ed Freeman/Getty Images; malefigure by Paul McGee/Getty Images

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2216-2

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9283-7

The Mysterious Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

For My Grandmother, Jean Griffen

Lion Plays Rough

Chapter 1

It was Saturday. I'd just biked to the top of the Bolinas-Fairfax Road and was turning onto Ridgecrest when I heard a car round the bend behind me—too fast and too close. The car was there before I could react. The bumper clipped my heel and sent me off onto the shoulder. As I went over the handlebars I saw a blue Pontiac convertible flash past.

I'd been pedaling uphill, so I hadn't been going fast; I rolled once and ended up sitting on my rear end in soft pine needles and dirt. As for the bike, the back wheel was bent and wouldn't turn. I was twenty miles from where I'd left my car, less than halfway through my ride.

It was eighty degrees in the shade, and the air was absolutely still. If the bumper had been a few inches to the right, I told myself . . . While my hands were still shaking but my breath was starting to slow, the convertible came back.

The driver stretched her long legs as she got out of the car. Her hair was straightened, spider web–fine, and she wore a cream-colored blouse, khaki shorts, and sandals. A spray of freckles ran across her upper chest.

I knew I should be angry with her, but I was glad to be alive. “You're goddamn lucky you didn't kill me,” I said.

She looked me over. “Not a scratch on you. Thank goodness.” She clicked her tongue at the bike. “You're not going anywhere on this.”

She opened the trunk and I put the bike in.

“Leo Maxwell,” I said. “Thanks, it's the least you can do. My car's down in Mill Valley on Highway One.”

She took my hand coolly. “Lavinia Martin. You know you swerved right in front of me.”

“That's not the way I remember it.”

She drove with both hands on the wheel, her eyes focused ahead. Alone with a beautiful woman in a convertible. It was a rare opportunity. These days I hardly ever talked with anyone who wasn't from work.

I tried again. “Is it my lucky day or do you have a habit of running down strange men on lonely roads?”

In response she reached back for her purse and opened it on the console between us. I looked down and saw a snub-nosed automatic, nickel-plated. “My husband bought that for me.”

“So you're married,” I said. After a moment she closed the purse and returned it to the back. It wasn't that I'd never seen a gun. I'd had guns pointed at me on occasion, even fired in my presence. It hadn't all been desk work. But still, I let a few miles go by before I spoke again.

“I prefer a forty-five,” I finally said. “Revolver. But I'm also the kind of guy who owns a typewriter. It's just style, I guess, personal preference. A forty-five was the gun my brother always kept. I'm pretty confident that when I squeeze the trigger a bullet's gonna come.”

Lavinia had her arm out of the car, her fingers spread in the wind. “Your brother a cop?”

“Criminal defense attorney. He was, anyway. His name is Teddy Maxwell. Maybe you heard of him.”

She looked like she was about to say yes, then shook her head, distaste showing in the set of her lips. So she was one of those who see criminal defense lawyers as little better than criminal accessories after the fact. Too bad.

“He was one of the best defense attorneys around. Then about two years ago one of his clients shot him in the head while we were eating lunch right across from Civic Center in San Francisco.”

She worked the gears, accelerating more aggressively into the curve, but otherwise showed no reaction.

“I was just out of law school, working for him.” She didn't reply, which had the effect of making me fill the silence.

And so I ended up telling her more than I intended, about the months in the hospital, then the half year in the rehab clinic where Teddy'd had to relearn how to swallow his food, dress himself, speak coherently.

“What does he do now?”

“Comes to the office every day. Does this and that. A little research, sits in on client meetings. He had to give up his bar card. He can't practice. For now we've got a place together, but I'm hoping that someday he'll be ready to live alone. That's what he wants, I know.”

We came out of the woods and into the sun. To our right, a green hillside sloped down toward the trees. As Ridgecrest Road climbs Mount Tamalpais, it offers some of the most glorious coastal views anywhere in California, sixteen hundred feet above the foaming sea. She didn't once turn her head.

At Panoramic she headed toward Mill Valley. I didn't try to talk to her again. You don't chat about the weather after you've told someone about your brother catching a bullet and relearning to feed himself. I would have liked to have gone on and told her how even now, two and a half years later, I still kept waiting for some flash of the old Teddy's formidable intelligence, how I suffered from the creeping illusion that he was faking it. Snap out of it, I kept wanting to tell him. Be yourself. Talk right.

I directed her to the parking area off Highway 1 at Stinson Beach where I'd left my car, Teddy's old Rabbit, not dead yet. “Look,” I said as I got out. “I'm a nice guy. I'm not going to sue you, but a new wheel is going to set me back about two hundred bucks, and that story about me swerving in front of you is bullshit.”

I did what nice guys do: I gave her my card and told her that she could send me a check.

Chapter 2

By eleven thirty I'd been home, showered, changed, and walked over to our offices at 580 Grand. On weekdays I was usually at my desk before seven. Jeanie, who commuted from Walnut Creek, would arrive around eight, our assistant, Lynn, at nine, and Teddy by nine thirty or ten.

Weekends I usually had the place to myself, unless we had a meeting with a client or a witness. I was the eager beaver, looking to make a name for myself, so that I'd be ready to strike out on my own when Jeanie finally said the hell with private practice and went back to the PD's office. Along with being my boss she was my brother's ex-wife. My real legal education had begun with Teddy that summer before the shooting, and in the past three years she'd finished it. I had two dozen jury trials under my belt, half of them felonies—and I'd won most of them. I was on a roll, brimming with self-confidence.

From my desk I heard Teddy when he showed up around one. He'd been to his brain-injury rehab group and had taken the bus up Telegraph to Berkeley and back by himself. Unmindful of social niceties even before the shooting, he didn't look in to say hi, but I heard him puttering around in the conference room.

At one forty-five Jeanie bustled in, keys jangling, phone chirping its low-battery warning. As usual, her presence raised the office energy level twofold. She was my height, with fine brown hair and a broad face; her beauty was in the way she carried herself, in her intelligence, in how she looked at people.

“Are we ready to go?” she asked as she passed my door without glancing in. “Coffee brewing? Got your game face on?” I heard her keys hit the desk in her office. “This guy's gonna be thinking about folding,” she went on. We couldn't see each other but we often held conversations from our desks, talking in raised voices through the doorways. “He's gonna be scared shitless. He's gonna ask you to call the DA and find out if that shitty deal's still on the table. What are you going to say?”

“Jeanie, relax.”

“You going to tell him what happens to child molesters in prison? Or are you going to do a number, convince him Leo Maxwell's the second coming of Clarence Darrow?”

“Am I supposed to notice your good mood?”

“Yeah, you are.” She now appeared. Teddy had come out into the hallway and stood looking at her from the doorway of his little office, not seeming to register my presence, though I was directly in his line of sight over Jeanie's shoulder. Ever since the shooting he had eyes only for her, eyes haunted by waste. “You know why?” she taunted.

“Why?”

“Because it's your fucking case, and I'm collecting the fee. That's why.” She turned. “And you,” she said to Teddy. “You'd better work on pulling a rabbit out of that Swiss cheese brain, because your little brother's going to trial in nine days and he hasn't got shit.”

“That's not true,” I protested. But I was following her script. “There's the girl's family life. Two years ago when all this started her parents were talking divorce. Then she comes forward with these allegations and voilà, they're back together. So that's motive. Then there's the cops, the suggestive interviews . . .”

“So it's liar, liar pants on fire.”

“Someone molested Erica Lawler. We're not denying that. She just went and transferred the guilt outside the immediate family. Someone safer for her to accuse than her own uncle. By now she probably believes the story she's been telling.” I nodded to the binder containing the report of the expert we'd hired to testify on the subject of kids making false allegations of sexual abuse.

“Sounds like reasonable doubt to me. But that's not what wins child sex-abuse cases. Reasonable doubt is for running stop signs, for shoplifting.”

“It's a theory of innocence.”

“And it's going to crumble to dust when they put that little girl on the stand so she can describe how her best friend's father raped her during a sleepover.”

“Okay. Then what do you propose?”

“Soft-pedal the divorce stuff. You can't push it too hard. Other­wise, she seems calculating, which is the one thing she surely is not. You can hit the interviews pretty hard. The DA wants the jurors to be afraid of a sex offender running loose, so you scare them with these so-called experts planting false accusations in the minds of sweet kids. Neutralize fear with fear. What if it was your kid they'd gotten hold of, your name they were asking her about? So that's your lizard brain appeal. You get the uncle on the stand, rip his guts out. Then reason with them. Appeal to the mammal brain; make them see how the brother fits. It's a hit job, pure and simple. Okay? Ready?”

In fact, she'd given me my trial plan back verbatim, only with an overlay of the lizard/mammal brain dichotomy she'd slapped on to every case ever since she'd picked it up in some CEB seminar. But there was no point calling her out. Scare the jurors then reason with them was Jeanie's basic trial strategy in all hot button cases. The DA's case invariably tapped in to undercurrents of primitive anger, primitive fear. We couldn't win such cases by appealing to reason and evidence until we'd neutralized the DA's fearmongering by scaring the jurors with our own primal nightmares.

The phone rang. “Leo? It's Marty Scarsdale. I'm downstairs.”

I went out to the hall to meet him. He was tall, in his late thirties, with thick, dark hair and a gray, pinched face. His palm was damp when we shook hands.

“How you holding up?” I asked. “How's the living situation?”

He was on bail, but his wife had thrown him out. The last I'd heard, he was staying with a college friend. “I had to move out of the place I was in,” he said. “I ended up checking in to this hotel out near the airport. Weekly rates.”

His stressful living situation meant the trial would be even more draining. He would probably come across as that much more guilt- ridden to the jurors as they studied his demeanor, looking for any sign he'd done what the DA said.

I led him into our offices and back to the conference room. Car was supposed to join us later. For years he'd been Teddy's go-to investigator; now he was Jeanie's. Car and I didn't get along, but his work was first-rate.

“So this is the first of many times we'll be sitting down together in the next few weeks,” I said once the three of us had our coffee. “You go to trial on June nineteenth. That's a week from Monday. But it won't necessarily start that morning. We'll be trailing, which means that each morning we'll know by ten
am
whether there's going to be a courtroom available. If there is, we go. If not, we wait another day. But criminal trials have priority, so we won't be waiting long.”

I recapped the case up to the present, listing the motions we'd filed to exclude various crucial pieces of evidence, reminding him of the preliminary hearing last winter in which he'd been held to answer based on the testimony of the investigating detective. I summarized the evidence the DA had turned over in discovery, including the videotaped interviews with the thirteen-year-old victim, Erica Lawler, in which she told of being sexually assaulted by Scarsdale while spending the night with his daughter, Angela, her best friend.

When I was finished Scarsdale looked up. “I've been thinking maybe you could talk to the DA again and there wouldn't be a trial.”

“I could talk to her,” I said. “But all along she's been saying they weren't going to let you plead to anything less than five years, with a lifetime sex offender registration requirement. That's five years in the state prison as a convicted child molester. It's not going to be easy time.”

“You don't think the DA might back down now that we're so close to trial?”

“I can talk to her and feel her out. But no, I don't think there's any chance she'll back down.”

“I didn't do this. I wish I understood why this was happening.”

“If I didn't think we could win, I would tell you, Marty. I think we've got a real shot. We've got a fantastic expert, a psychologist who has testified dozens of times about the phenomenon of an innocent person being accused when the child can't bring herself to name the true perpetrator. I've spent hours with her, and she's going to be a very convincing witness.”

I went on to reiterate the basic theory of our defense: that Scarsdale was innocent, and that Erica had in fact been having sex with her uncle, who was living with the family at the time of the alleged rape but moved out shortly after she'd come forward with the story about Scarsdale assaulting her during the sleepover.

Scarsdale listened intently, giving little nods as I went on. “We'll hit the police hard for not exploring alternate theories. At least in the initial phases, no one once asked her about the uncle. She named you, so they ran with it. We'll be able to show that from the beginning the cops were focused on making their case against you rather than learning what actually happened.”

The door opened and Car slipped in. He had his BlackBerry in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. Thickets of tattooed foliage ran up his arms. His head was shaved, his face unlined. He looked half his true age of forty-five.

“So you can show that they ran a cruddy investigation,” Scarsdale said. “But what about Erica's story? She's sticking to it, right?”

“We have to show that she might have a reason to lie, without making her look calculating. The jury's going to believe she was sexually assaulted. The question is who did it. Car's done the legwork. He can tell you what he's found out about the family situation.”

Car finished whatever he was doing on his BlackBerry and tucked it away. He succinctly summarized the parents' deteriorating marriage. The uncle, the wife's younger brother, had been living with the family after losing his job as a teacher; he'd been the girl's nanny, basically, picking her up from school, taking her to friends' houses or home, watching TV with her. While he lived with them, Erica spent more time with him than with her parents. Then she'd become pregnant and the uncle had taken her to have an abortion. She hadn't told her parents until after the procedure. Then she accused Scarsdale.

The uncle had refused to talk to Car, which suggested he had something to hide even if he didn't. In the meantime, we'd kept the pressure up. Car had showed up at the guy's new job and apartment, until he hired a lawyer who told us to stay away. I had the uncle under subpoena. When we finally met in the courtroom, he was sure to be hostile and scared. In the meantime, Car was looking into his background, turning over stones.

“So you're going to concede that she was molested,” Scarsdale said when Car and I had finished.

I shot a glance at Jeanie. “Probably.”

“There's no chance in your mind that she's just making it all up, trying to get attention.” His breath was short now, his cheeks flushed, and I saw that over the past few months he'd grown capable of hating this little girl. Even if he were innocent, even if we managed to clear his name, some vestige of this hatred would remain, like the scar from a burn, the lasting damage that always results from prolonged involvement with the criminal justice system.

If the emotion I was seeing now surfaced at trial, we were in trouble. On an impulse I took a DVD from the file. “This disc has the interviews the police videotaped with the girl.” I held it out. “It's the story she'll tell in court.”

He shook his head. “I don't want to look at it. That's your department.”

“You have to. And you need to do
more
than just look at it. You have to live with it. Take it back with you to that hotel and watch the whole thing. Watch it again and again. Every day until trial starts, whether you can stand it or not. I want you to keep watching until you can hear her talk about you doing these things without getting mad, without flinching, without so much as raising your blood pressure.” I shot Jeanie a glance and saw her pensive frown. This wasn't the plan, but we had to do something to neutralize the reaction we'd just witnessed.

“It's a good idea, actually,” she said. “You might see something we haven't seen. You know Erica better than we do. She's your daughter's best friend. What we're looking for is something that doesn't sound like her own words, some turn of phrase that gives us an opening on cross-examination.”

Jeanie gave me a look of apology, but we'd already agreed that she would be doing the cross.

“I don't know if I can do this,” Scarsdale told us.

I sighed. “Then you might as well plead guilty. Because if the jury sees the look on your face that I saw a few minutes ago, you're done. Look, you can't show anger. You have to pity her. Find a way. That's your task over the next eight days.”

Car was on his BlackBerry again. He shook Scarsdale's hand, then ducked out of the conference room. Scarsdale rubbed his bloodshot eyes, and I realized we'd probably done all the work we were going to be able to do today. I suggested we wrap it up and meet again on Wednesday.

When I returned from walking Scarsdale out, Teddy and Jeanie were at the conference table, Jeanie on her laptop, Teddy gazing out the window toward Lake Merritt. I sat back down at my place.

“So do you think he did it?” my brother asked after a minute.

There was a pause. The old Teddy would never have asked that. Not only would the question never have occurred to him, but also the answer wouldn't have mattered. The scar in his brow was little more than a dent, half-covered by a lock of hair that had come back gray. Its fissures, though, ran deep.

“Probably,” I said. “Either way, his money's the same shade.”

Jeanie squeezed Teddy's shoulder and went out of the conference room. A moment later I heard her leave. When she'd gone, Teddy retreated to his office. His limp was barely noticeable these days until he got tired. I watched him as he went, and then I looked down with impatience. The old Teddy would have known how to win Jeanie back, but the old Teddy had used up all his chances.