Shadow Image (19 page)

The city skyline loomed just ahead, through a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows designed to showcase every possible inch of the Golden Triangle below—the confluence of the three rivers, the stadium on the North Side, Downtown, Point State Park. It was the same view that brought tourists in droves to the dozen other restaurants clinging to the edge of Mount Washington. Fiorello's, though, was strictly for locals of a particular social caste, that being, according to Brenna, the friends and family of numbers king Dominic Coniglio, for whom the restaurant provided a legitimate cover. Brenna's client roster had at various times included several of Coniglio's top lieutenants.

Christensen found her in the bar, her back to him, in animated conversation with a dwarfish man whose thick, black chest hair spilled over the tie knot and cinched collar of his white silk shirt. From TV news footage and newspaper photographs, Christensen recognized the tinted glasses and red rosebud on the lapel of his shiny suit jacket as the trademarks of Salvatore “One Nut” Gianni. Brenna had represented him two years earlier when his stewardship of Coniglio's East Liberty operations had been briefly interrupted by an ill-conceived sting operation. Christensen still marveled at how easily Brenna adapted to the diverse and dangerous worlds into which her professional life often thrust her.

Gianni stiffened as Christensen approached. Brenna turned and smiled, kissing him on the cheek.

“Jim, I'd like you to meet Sal,” she said.

Christensen extended his right hand. Gianni removed his right hand from inside his suit jacket, where it apparently moved reflexively when a stranger approached, and offered a wary shake of his multiringed fingers.

Brenna winked, but with the eye Gianni couldn't see. “Sal here was just offering generous campaign support if I decide to go for the council spot. He said I was the only Irish lawyer he'd ever trusted.”

Gianni shrugged. “We like Jews, lawyer-wise, but she done me a real favor. I return favors.”

Brenna stood up. “I'm starving. Everything okay at home?”

“Fine. Sorry I'm a little late.”

Brenna shook Gianni's hand. “Thanks for the drink, Sal. Stay out of trouble.”

“You'll hear from me if I don't,” he said.

Christensen followed her to a table with a view of forever. Her perfume trail mingled with the aroma rising from tables covered by plates of warm pasta and chilled romaine, an intoxicating combination. Waiters swarmed as soon as they sat down, plucking the Reserved card from the table's center, depositing a basket of warm focaccia, upending their wineglasses, pouring olive oil and balsamic vinegar into a wide saucer with ceremonial grace. The attention seemed ridiculously overdone, like the decor.

“You're pretty venerated around here,” he said.

“They take care of their lawyers.”

“A business expense, I suppose.” He shook his head.

“What?”

“I just don't get to see you in your element that often,” he said. “You run with a pretty rough crowd sometimes.”

“These guys?” Brenna waved him off. “I'll take them any day over the snakes on Grant Street.”

Christensen used a piece of focaccia to sop up some vinegar and oil. A waiter brought wine, one of Brenna's favorite black-roostered Chiantis, and set to work on the cork. He poured a taste in Brenna's glass and waited, apparently thrilled by her smiling nod.

“Do you ever worry about it?”

Brenna cocked her head.

“Working with people like Gianni, I mean. You must know a lot of secrets.”

“Defense lawyers always do.” She turned an imaginary key, locking her lips. “We get paid to keep them.”

The comment weighed heavier than Christensen expected. Brenna's eyes drifted to the windows, to the city below, but once they shifted they never seemed to focus. The wineglass rested against her lips, still awaiting her second taste. The crowd of waiters around their table had thinned, the last one depositing a single-page menu in front of each of them before leaving with a bow.

“Nothing from the morgue yet,” she said. “No IDs.”

“What if it is the Chembergos, Bren?”

She shook her head. “They're not the only Hispanics in Pittsburgh. They're not even still in the country, supposedly.”

“Then why are you so worried?”

She finally looked at him. “I'm not worried. I'm curious.”

“I'm
worried,” he said. “I need to finish the story I started to tell you.”

In her office that morning, he'd wanted to tell her about Chip Underhill and Carrie Haygood and the possible causes of subdural hematoma. He had so much else he wanted to tell, about the Gray horse and Floss Underhill's strange paintings and Warren Doti and Simon Bostwick and the theory that was percolating up through that murky collection of facts. But Liisa had said someone was waiting and they'd agreed on Fiorello's as he left, leaving him to struggle with the burden for the rest of the day.

He leaned forward, trying to keep his voice low. “Bren, this whole thing got weird today. I think we're into something a lot deeper than we thought.”

“Your meeting with Haygood?”

He nodded. “That's why I was so curious about her allegiances and Dagnolo and all that. But I didn't get a chance to tell you what we talked about, or about some of the other stuff that's come up about Floss.”

“Like I said, Haygood's a cipher to me.” Brenna set her wineglass back on the table. “That review team is so new, and it operates outside the normal channels. There's no buzz about it, or her. At all.”

Christensen leaned even closer. “I showed her the morgue paperwork on Chip Underhill. She's already looking into it.”

Brenna smiled. “That's her job.”

“No, Bren, no. The Underhills' story about the horse didn't wash. She all but said that's not how the kid died.”

Brenna stared until a passing waiter was out of earshot. “How, then?”

“The $64,000 question. But there's apparently nothing in the coroner's report that supports the story about him getting kicked by a horse. Remember what your pal Levin said about the ‘little skeleton' in the Underhill family closet? I'd bet Haygood leaked something to him. And I'm wondering if what he said about Floss might be right, the thing about somebody trying to keep her quiet.”

Brenna gave him an exasperated look. “Aren't you the conspiracy theorist? Well, how about this one: Maybe Haygood's doing all this because she works for Dagnolo.”

Christensen stared. Her dismissal was defensive, not just indifferent. “There's a lot more I haven't told you about, Bren, but it's all starting to make a strange sort of sense. I don't think it's that simple; it's not just politics.”

“Jim, Dagnolo's watching Ford Underhill waltz into the job he wanted, the one the state Democratic committee told him was his until Underhill decided to run. He's pissed off.”

“I don't—”

“So I'm not surprised he'd sic Haygood—”

“Bren, would you
listen
to me?” At adjoining tables, heads turned. Brenna froze, her wineglass suspended halfway between the table and her lips.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Maybe the world does work the way you think it does, maybe it's a big power game where everybody's just trying to get an edge. I hope it is.” Why was he so angry? He ratcheted his voice down to a stage whisper. “But I don't think we can ignore what's happening here. I don't think we can overlook our questions about the Underhills anymore. It's getting too—” He searched for the right word. “—plausible. When I put all the pieces together, I wonder if maybe what happened to this kid is at the heart of it.”

“Of what?” she said.

“Of everything.”

A waiter arrived to take their order, standing impassively while they stared across the table at one another. Brenna handed him her menu. “You know what I want, Antonio.” Christensen ordered his favorite pasta.

“You're not making sense,” Brenna said after they were alone again.

He took a deep, calming breath, then a sip of Chianti. “Just hear me out.”

Brenna listened. She sat back while he described the events of the past few days, events that were the building blocks of a disturbing possibility. Now that he said it aloud, the whole thing sounded nearly as paranoid as it did plausible. When he was done, she waited through the waiter's elaborate Caesar salad preparations before reacting.

“All right,” she said, refilling her wineglass. “If some specific memories are leaking from Floss's brain, as you say, how can you be sure they're accurate?”

“I can't, Bren. The thing about Alzheimer's is it doesn't usually distort memories so much as it leaves them without context. That's why the images in her paintings are so, so—”

“Bizarre.”

“But they're not, really. They seem disjointed, I know, but the common thread is the time frame. The horse, Gray, is the key. He was involved in the boy's death, then he was shipped off to this private ranch out in Westmoreland County about the same time as Warren Doti. She loses a grandson, a favorite horse, and a man I think was her lover all at the same time. When you understand how all that unfolded, her fixation on those images makes perfect sense.”

“It does?”

“Because she may remember it all. It just doesn't make sense to her. Maybe because of her disease. Maybe because she was told a version of events that doesn't add up for some reason. Who knows? But think about it, Bren. What if Floss knew how that child really died and kept it quiet to protect somebody. Hell, say she did it or helped cover it up. If the family all of a sudden couldn't control her anymore, don't you think that would make her a fairly dangerous person to have around?”

Brenna nibbled at a forkful of chilled romaine, then put it down unfinished. “That's a little melodramatic, don't you think?”

He shook his head, leaning closer, speaking again in a whisper. “Until you think about the stakes, Bren. We're not just talking about a statewide election here. We're talking about a political and social legacy that goes back four generations. We're talking about national aspirations. We're talking about a family with everything, but its whole reputation is based on its image as a positive force in this community. If there
is
a dirty little family secret, something as unforgivable as I think it is, something everybody thought was dead and buried, can't you see how the need to control that secret suddenly could be the most important thing in the world?”

Brenna watched Christensen pick a meaty black anchovy out of his salad, then speared it with her fork. “But kill her? I just don't buy it.”

“Even with so much at stake?”

“It's too cold-blooded, Jim. They could have shut her off, kept her from contact with the outside world. She could have lived twenty more years in that Fox Chapel house and nobody would have ever known if she was alive or dead. Look at Ronald Reagan. The guy just vanished the day he was diagnosed.”

“Which is pretty much the way it was with Floss until last week,” he said. “But remember when all this started?”

Brenna counted back on her fingers. “What day did she fall? Last Saturday?”

“No, the context. Remember what happened just before she got hurt?”

She shook her head.

“Maura's art show. One of her horse paintings was going to be in the show, out there for everyone to see.”

Brenna shoved her half-eaten salad away. “Those images wouldn't mean anything to anybody.”

“Except the people who knew what they meant, or who knew she was struggling to make sense of something. I mean, the
Press
critic singled out her painting and wrote about it in the paper, for God's sake. A couple days later, Floss Underhill is at the bottom of a ravine and the cops are looking for the person who this gardener says may have pushed her. And now the gardener and his wife are gone.”

Christensen could see he'd connected. Brenna didn't object when a waiter took her plate of unfinished salad.

“Or worse,” he added.

They fell into an uneasy silence, their eyes drifting to the windows, to the city below. It was getting dark now, and Pittsburgh's skyline was emerging in silhouette against the hills of the North Side. Christensen felt suddenly alone, suddenly afraid. When he turned his attention back to Brenna, a plate of
linguini al pomodoro fresco
was in front of him and a heaping plate of calamari in front of her. When had it arrived?

“Bren?”

“Hmm?”

“What if I'm right?”

She slipped a tine of her fork through a rubbery loop of squid and lifted it to her lips. She chewed it thoughtfully, but without much enthusiasm. “These are my
clients.
I'm obligated to defend them.”

“No matter what?”

Brenna stopped chewing. “Time for my Socratic questions,” she said. “Let's assume someone in that family is guilty of whatever you suspect. Do you think they should have a trial before we execute them?”

“Of course.”

“Should the trial be fair?”

He nodded.

“Should the accused have an attorney?”

“Yes.”

“Should the attorney be competent?”

“Yes.”

“And honorable?”

Christensen felt her logic tightening like a noose. “Yes.”

“Even if someone in the family is guilty, shouldn't I, as their attorney, make the investigators and prosecutors prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt?”

He nodded again, unable to argue a single point.

Brenna set her fork down and leaned back in her chair. “Let me do my job then.”

“But Bren, what if?”

He waited. Something had changed her. Private practice? Political ambition? He remembered the idealism that had kept her in the public defender's office so much longer than her contemporaries, remembered her longtime commitment to defending the rights of those who couldn't defend themselves. How different she seemed now. The worst-case scenario was chilling: a little boy dead, a cover-up that led to the attempted murder of his grandmother, a cover-up of that attempted murder that may have led to other murders, depending on identification of the two bodies at the morgue. Christensen knew Brenna was calculating the possibilities, too, as she rearranged the food on her plate.