Matter of Trust (23 page)

Lorraine let fly – her right arm slicing from above and ripping through the air with such determination that her flat, multi-ringed hand cut sharply across Marilyn's left cheek in a slap so loud that it caused a momentary halt to the battle.

And that was when Chris moved swiftly in retaliation, lunging forward to pick up the legs of Lorraine's now glass-littered table and using all his strength to lift them way up off the floor.

And that was when the table flipped.

And that was when the glass shattered.

And that was when Lorraine lost consciousness, never to wake again.

‘H
ow much?' asked Gloria Kincaid, barely giving David a moment to take it all in, accosting him the second he finally made it to the back of the courtroom, dragging him away from the now burgeoning media throng and pulling him into a nearby vacant office.

‘Jesus, Gloria,' he said, still reeling from the events that had taken place mere moments before.

Gloria shut the door behind them. They had no business being in what looked to be the court administrator's private enclave, but the woman was obviously beyond caring.

‘Shut up and listen to me,' she said finally releasing his elbow. ‘I asked you, how much?' She started rifling through her Gucci clutch for a chequebook and pen.

‘You want to pay me off?' David could not believe it.

‘If that's what it takes to make you go away. Your performance in court just now,' she said, her lips clenching so tightly they completely drained of colour, ‘. . . it was
beyond
incompetent. You embarrassed us – you
humiliated
Chris by association. You are a pathetic excuse for an attorney, David, and I want you out of our lives.'

David took a step forward. He had never wanted to strike a woman before, it was not who he was – who he'd been raised to be – but it took
all his strength not to physically lash out at the perfectly coiffed woman in front of him – a woman who had controlled everything and everyone she came in contact with, for her entire life.

‘This isn't your decision, Gloria,' he said, trying to restrain himself. ‘Chris is my client, not you.'

‘Chris is my son and he does what I tell him.'

‘Chris is a man who is more than capable of making his own decisions.'

‘Oh.' She laughed through gritted teeth. ‘That's precious, considering you and I both know that the few independent decisions my son has ever made have ended in disaster.'

She had a point, but David still shook his head in disagreement. ‘This is your fault as much as anyone else's. You should have told me the girl had died.'

All these years Chris and his mother had covered up the fact that Lorraine Stankovic had died from the complications of the injuries she sustained on the night of that college bar brawl. All these years David had believed Chris's story that his family had discreetly paid for the girl's medical treatment and rehabilitation so that she might be nursed back to health.

Even after Mike had called Chris on his actions, even after the two of them had beaten each other black and blue on that horrible night that ended in the trio's fateful truce at Quincy's Five Corners Bar, Chris had never told them the truth. And in that moment, David hated him for it – hated Chris, and hated his mother as well.

‘What the hell happened, Gloria? How did the girl die?'

David saw the woman shudder. It would not be out of pity for the girl, David knew, but because Chris's actions had created a burden that necessitated her pulling every legal and political string she could get her hands on.

‘There's no point in hiding it now,' he went on, knowing she would need some convincing to share. ‘The cat is well and truly out of the bag. Whether you like it or not, I'm going to defend your son on the serious charge of murder, and if FAP Marshall is right, if Lorraine Stankovic died because Chris—'

‘She didn't die,' snapped Gloria finally. ‘At least, not immediately. In fact we'd already paid tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills when she selfishly packed it in.'

‘You're blaming the girl for her own death?' David was stunned, the woman was beyond arrogant.

‘The doctors couldn't understand why her condition did not improve. They'd stemmed the bleeding in her brain, but they said it appeared as if she had no will to recover. No
guts
, for Christ's sake. The girl's mother was a greedy lush. She saw us coming and asked for $50,000 cash – threatened us with going to the media when we'd managed to keep the whole situation under wraps.'

‘But she wouldn't have had a leg to stand on. Chris was never charged.'

Gloria glanced toward the frosted glass door behind them before lowering her voice. ‘He was charged with aggravated assault after one of the Rutgers students came forward to make a statement. Chris's father, through his extensive contacts, managed to get it reduced to simple assault.'

David marvelled at the power of a family such as the Kincaids, given the major difference between the charges of aggravated and simple assault was the seriousness of injury or extent of bodily harm. If Chris's actions had left Lorraine in a comatose state, then the first charge was more than warranted.

‘You have to understand where Chris was at in his life,' Gloria continued. ‘He had just been accepted into Princeton, his father was ill, we knew his days were numbered. Chris's future was our only concern – and any link to this girl and her injuries was . . . well, unthinkable. But then the girl up and died on us,' she said, now resting on the clerk's desk behind her. ‘And the mother started making noises – loud enough for the Prosecutor's Office to come calling on Chris once again. They said that now that the girl had passed, a new charge would be considered – one of reckless manslaughter for God's sake. They wanted to re-open the case, and re-interview the witnesses.'

Gloria shook her head in frustration, her perfectly styled ash-blonde hair shifting before coming neatly to rest once again.

‘By this stage, Daniel was bedridden, the cancer finally taking control. So I did the only thing I could do: I retraced our steps back to the hospital, spoke to the girl's physician and after some lengthy discussions, succeeded in getting him to reassess the official cause of death. The accident had caused her brain to haemorrhage, this was indisputable, but the cause of the bleeding was reconsidered. There was a possibility she had died from
an aneurism, you see. That she was a walking time bomb just ready to explode.'

‘You convinced the doctor to lie about his original diagnosis?'

‘I convinced the hospital that a one million dollar donation to their much-needed trauma wing wasn't something to be laughed at. You have to remember that the possibility the girl might have had an aneurism was not outside the realms of possibility. True, the EPO then argued it was most likely Chris's actions had triggered the aneurism, but from what the witnesses in that horrible bar had said already, the girl was shoved this way and that several times by numerous combatants during the fight. One witness even stated that Chris's girlfriend had pulled the girl's hair, which meant that technically, if I'd pursued it,
she
might have been the one found guilty.'

David could see the regret in Gloria's eyes – that she had been in a position to point the finger at Marilyn but hadn't had the opportunity to do so.

‘So the charge of involuntary manslaughter went away?' he said.

‘Yes, along with the assault charge which was moot given the girl was deceased. We even managed to get the original charge expunged from Chris's record.'

‘So effectively Lorraine's death was a better result for Chris compared to the original assault charge.'

‘Effectively.'

David was disgusted. ‘And Chris walked,' he said knowing Gloria would hear the disdain in his voice.

‘Yes,' she bit. ‘As did you, Mike, Rebecca
and
Chris's girlfriend.' She made the point with determination, and in the very least David found himself giving her credit for never allowing morality to protect her own son from himself.

‘But it didn't work,' said David.

‘Oh, yes it did,' she argued.

‘No, Gloria, you may have stopped the battle but you didn't end the war. Marshall is a man on a mission, he must have toiled through twenty-year-old expungements to discover what he did. Next he'll wheel out Lorraine's mother, and the doctor you bribed.'

‘The doctor is dead. He died a year or so after the new trauma centre was completed, they named it for him. That's how I know.'

‘And Lorraine's mom?'

‘I have no idea. She looked like she had one foot in the grave over two decades ago. My guess is she followed her daughter – and if not, I am sure she will be more than conducive to . . .' Gloria stopped herself there, but David knew exactly what she had been about to say.

‘Your chequebook is not the answer, Gloria,' he said, pointing at the booklet in her manicured right hand.

‘Really?' She managed a smile. ‘It's worked wonders before.'

‘Not today.'

And despite herself, Gloria nodded.

They stood there in silence for a while, David eventually moving beside her to lean on the clerk's desk as well.

‘If you lose this, I will ruin you,' Gloria said eventually.

‘If I lose, you won't have to,' he replied.

‘You still care for him, after all these years.'

‘He's my friend,' he said.

‘Despite his ridiculous obsession with not letting go of the past.'

‘No,' replied David. ‘Because of it.'

N
ew Jersey Port Authority Police Department Sergeant John Cusack had been dirty, and his son Will knew it. Mind you, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that the various shady-looking characters who used to arrive at their back door late on a Sunday evening with fags in their mouths and fat yellow envelopes in their hands were up to no good. And it didn't take a university degree to establish that the envelopes got fatter as the years went by – right up until the weeks before 9/11, when his dad got a tip-off that he was being investigated by IAB, after which the shady characters vanished and the envelopes disappeared.

Will's mother was asleep, no doubt aided by the painkillers she was addicted to. She used to be a pretty Portuguese girl with chestnut hair and a figure that turned men's heads and now she was an undernourished mess who spent her days scamming prescriptions off the local dealers and her nights dulling the pain of a life gone to ruin with whatever pharmaceutical mix she had managed to collect that day.

Will had made certain discoveries about the importance of family after his father had died and all of them went to highlight the extent of his mother's failings. He would like to think that he loved her, but truth be told, he was jack of her. He had spent a great deal of his youth defending her against the curled fists of his pathetic excuse for a father and she'd
repaid him with nothing but a blank stare and an empty bank account. In the end, Will figured there was only so much you could do for a woman who swapped her mother's engagement ring for a pre-opened packet of Vicodin.

It was late. Will's bedroom was dark. He had decided, having sensed Jack needed some space, not to stay at the Delgados' tonight. The Delgado place had been his regular refuge over the past ten years – providing him with more of a home than this place.

His apartment smelt of cabbage – not from tonight's dinner as his mom had stopped cooking for him years ago, but from decades of the goddamned borscht that his Polish father had insisted his mother make. The cabbage and beet soup had been a staple in their tiny two-bedroom home as long as Will could remember, and now the stink of it was imprinted in his nostrils, feeding his resentment, poisoning his lungs.

Will's problem, as far as he could tell, was that he did not know if he had a problem or not. He'd created one, but then it went away, thanks to some quick thinking and the decision to involve Connor.

He hadn't intended for things to go as far as they had – but he was his father's son after all, and his father had spent his entire life overstepping the mark – in his career, in his physical abuse of his wife, and in his stupid fucking decision to drag his corrupt cop ass up the stairs of the north tower until the walls began to shake.

Now Will had overstepped the mark too – no doubt about that.

My biggest problem, he thought, as he reclined on his brown-sheeted double bed, the pillow itchy with sediment from the construction work next door, is not knowing how much they know.

After the evidence revealed at this morning's show-stopping court appearance, it appeared as though Chris Kincaid was screwed, which he deserved to be, given it was his fucking selfishness that had started this whole thing in the first place. But then there was the unknown quantity of what any new discovery might prove. What if Connor was right when he suggested the whore's body might have acted as an incubator for clues Will had assumed had been washed away in the tide? What if there were other small details they failed to erase in their rush? If Kincaid walked, there could be a problem – the police would continue to look for the
real
villain and not stop until they found him.

And then there was the issue of the money. All this trouble and Will was
not one single cent ahead
– which had been his sole motivation in the first place. The whore had done something with the $100,000 – he just didn't know what!

Then Will felt an idea brewing in the far recesses of his brain.

He closed his eyes and willed it to come.

It usually did, if he identified its source and chased it down and yanked it from the darkness of his subconscious and into the light.