He insisted on carrying my bag. When we stepped outside the terminal into the balmy California air, he raised his head, looked around for a moment, then waved his hand. I thought he was signaling for a cab; instead, a limousine, which had been waiting a half block away, pulled up to the curb.
I settled into the back seat, across from Bobby. He looked different now, older, with the first touch of gray in his hair and the first telltale lines at the corners of his eyes. The smile still flashed, quick and alert, but it was a little dimmer, like a light that almost imperceptibly had begun to fade.
“It was good of you to come,”he remarked as he turned away from the driver, to whom he had just given instructions. “I know it's an imposition, and I appreciate it.”
His voice was as clear as ever, but he spoke a little more slowly than the way I had remembered.
“It's not an imposition at all,”I told him. “Whether or not I take the case, I'm glad you thought of me.”
He shook his head emphatically, as if it were for some reason important that I understand I was wrong about that.
“No, this wasn't my idea. Albert Craven asked me to call you. He's done a lot for me, and he never asks me for anything. That's the only reason I did it: because I couldn't think of a decent way to say no. But I made it clear to him that while I was willing to ask you to talk to him, I wouldn't ask you to take the case. It's up to you whether you do it or not. And if you decide not to, that's all right. You don't owe Albert anything; and you don't me anything, either. Okay?”
Suddenly it was right there in front of us, gleaming in the golden light, sweeping down across the hills toward the bay. The City.
Bobby saw the look in my eye. “Ever think about living here?”
I shook my head. “I think I'd miss the rain,”I said with a lying smile.
Leaving the freeway, the limousine began to crawl through the city streets.
“You said something on the phone about repercussions. You said none of the lawyers here were willing to take the case. And now you've just finished telling me in no uncertain terms that you're not asking me to take the case. What's the reason no one wants to be involved in this? Is it because Fullerton was a United States senator who wanted to be president, and, from what I hear, had a pretty good chance of doing it?”
It was not the reaction I expected. Bobby laughed, and then he sighed.
“It doesn't have anything to do with Fullerton—not directly, anyway. You won't find many people—people who actually knew him—who are all that upset that he's dead.”
We pulled up in front of a dark gray stone facade in the heart of the financial district, where the firm of Craven, Morris and Hall had established their offices long before any of the new skyscrapers had been built. The firm had grown with the city. Many of the small banks and businesses that had retained its services in the beginning had become major financial institutions and international corporations. Fees, which had been barely large enough to cover the monthly overhead, had gradually become enormous, and the original three partners, nearly destitute when they first started, had become wealthier than they had ever dared dream.
Morris and Hall had largely withdrawn from the active practice of law and only dropped by the office to provide occasional, and seldom more than cursory, supervision over the dozens of junior partners who all worked like slaves in the hope of one day becoming as rich and leisured as their masters. It was the way of the world, or at least that part of it made up of lawyers who started out wanting to conquer the world and ended up settling for a place in Palm Springs.
Albert Craven was something of an exception. Palm Springs, he insisted, was too hot and golf too boring. It did not matter that he actually believed both these things to be true; he would have said them had he thought they were false. It was the kind of facile remark he liked to make, especially when it gave him a way to avoid a direct response to the question of why he kept working as hard as he did. After all these years, he was still the first in the office in the morning and the last to leave at night. He dismissed any suggestion that for a man his age this was rather singular behavior with the observation that he had to make up for the two- and sometimes three-hour lunches he regularly took with some one or the other of his socially prominent friends.
He would have done nothing differently had he had no friends. After four miserable marriages, the practice of law was one of the few remaining things for which he permitted himself any serious enthusiasm. Carrying a caseload that would have exhausted the energies and taxed the talents of a lawyer half his age, Albert Craven worked relentlessly. Others might use a standard form or, if they were a bit more creative, devise a form of their own and then use it over and over again; Craven still drafted from scratch every document he needed. In a none-too-veiled allusion to the slipshod habits rampant in the profession, he claimed he owed it to his clients to think the whole thing through from beginning to end. Craven practiced what in the trade was called office law. In his entire career he had appeared in court only twice, and on both occasions had become physically ill. Bobby was sure I would like him; I was not at all certain that I would.
I stepped out of the cushioned silence of the limousine into the shrill, heart-pounding sounds of the city. Pedestrians crowded the sidewalks; cars honked their horns; somewhere around the corner a cable car clanked its bell. All the noise, all that raucous music of daily life shut behind us the moment we entered the thick-carpeted third-floor chambers of the firm. The receptionist greeted Bobby, or rather Mr. Medlin, as she called him, in the same hushed whisper with which I had just heard her answer the telephone. A bud vase on the counter held a single red rose, new that morning and, I was sure, every morning.
There were dozens of people who worked there, but it could not have been quieter had you found yourself completely alone. We walked down a long hallway, every door we passed closed, until we came to the private office at the end. The door opened before we could knock, and Albert Craven, his oval pink face beaming, extended a small soft hand. He introduced himself, thanked me for coming, and, slipping aside, invited us into a room more elaborately furnished than all but a handful of homes I had ever been inside.
On one side of the long rectangular cream-colored room, above the mantel of a gray marble fireplace that looked as if it were fully serviceable, hung an oil painting of San Francisco in flames, the immediate aftermath of the earthquake of l906. On either side of the fireplace, other paintings, depicting in their immense variety other scenes from the city's past, filled up the wall. At the far end of the room, below a window in the corner farthest from the fireplace, was Craven's desk, an enormous reddish black Victorian creation quite unlike anything I had ever seen. Four thick bulging bow legs supported a tabletop with intricate filigree around the sides and an inlaid chocolate brown writing surface in the middle. It was incredibly ugly, so ugly that any question about it—where it had come from or how long he had had it—would have seemed utterly tactless. It was like dealing with the unfortunate disfigurement of a relative: There was just not too much you could think to say. All you could do was try not to notice too much.
Craven was dressed in a dark blue suit, light blue silk shirt, and pale yellow silk tie. Sitting behind his massive desk in an overstuffed pearl-gray chair, he looked at me over a pair of small rimless glasses perched at the end of his pudgy nose. He was about to say something when Bobby, who was directly to my left in one of two matching beige brocaded chairs, asked, “Isn't this the ugliest piece of furniture you've ever seen in your life?”
Resting his smooth, perfectly manicured fingers just below his chest, Craven allowed a subtle smile to edge its way across his cherubic face.
“I admit it isn't terribly attractive, but I'm not sure I would go quite so far as that.”The smile grew broader. “What Robert really wants me to do is tell you how I happen to have it. For some reason the story seems to amuse him, though I really can't think why. It's more a tragedy than a comedy. You see, Mr. Antonelli—”
“Joseph,”I insisted.
“You see, Joseph,”he went on, acknowledging with a slight nod the abandonment of strict formality, “Agatha, my second wife …”He hesitated, a perplexed expression clouding his brow. “Or was she my third?”he asked, glancing toward Bobby. “Well,”he said with a shrug, “she was one of them, and she bought it for me. It was a gift; more than that,”he added, frowning, “it was a wedding gift.”
He caught my reaction before I was conscious that I had one.
“Yes, yes, I know,”he said, rolling his eyes at the ceiling. “It was doomed from the start. But, you have to understand, Agatha thought it was a treasure. Not because of the way it looked,”he quickly added. “She didn't care anything about that! No, she had to have it as soon as she discovered it had originally been owned by J. Pierpont Morgan. She bought it at an auction at Sotheby's in New York, made arrangements to have it shipped here, and had it installed while we were away on our honeymoon.”Bright with mischief, Craven's eyes bounced from one side of the ceiling to the other. “You can imagine my surprise when I found it here,”he said with a grin. “I hadn't thought the honeymoon had gone that badly!”
“That explains how you got it,”said Bobby. “It doesn't explain why you still have it.”
Dropping his eyes, Craven folded his arms and retreated into his chair. His mouth pulled back into a grimace, his nostrils flared, and he slowly shook his head. Then he lifted his gaze and explained, “She insisted upon it as part of the divorce.”
He sprang forward and sat up straight, resting his elbows on the solid surface of the article neither party to their divorce wanted to have.
“It isn't what you think,”he went on, a sparkle in his eye. “It wasn't because she hated me. It wasn't that at all. Agatha thought I would be devastated and thought that leaving me this was the least she could do to alleviate the pain.”
With his bare knuckles he rapped the hard finish twice. “What could I say? That the only pain I felt was the prospect of having to look at this damn thing every day?”
The smile lingered on his mouth, but his eyes grew serious. He raised his chin and sniffed and the smile faded away.
“You didn't come all this way to hear the history of my furniture. You of course know about the murder of Senator Fullerton. A young man has been charged with the crime. I want to retain you to represent him.”
“
You
want to retain me?”I asked.
“The young man they have accused,”he replied without hesitation, “doesn't have any money, and neither does his mother. I've known her for years, and while I've never met her son, I can't imagine he could have had anything to do with this. Though I have to admit, it doesn't look very good,”he added with a sigh. “In any event, I want him to have the best defense attorney available, and that's why I'm asking you to do it.”
It did not feel right, and I still could not believe that there was not someone here he could get to do it.
“There are a lot of attorneys in San Francisco,”I replied. “I can even recommend one or two.”
“No,”said Craven quite firmly. “Only someone from the outside can do this. I've spent my whole life in San Francisco. It isn't like other places. Everybody here knows everybody else, and Jeremy Fullerton knew something about all of them: the people who run this city, the people who own it. None of them are all that eager to have what he knew spread across the front pages of the morning paper. And by the way,”he added almost as an aside, “I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if one of them was behind his murder.”
T
he first, frenzied news reports had told everyone all they needed to know about who had murdered Jeremy Fullerton and why. A United States senator had been shot to death by a black teenage boy who had stolen his wallet. It was every white person's nightmare: the black kid without a conscience; the drug-crazed gangster with the dead eyes, the defiant grin, and the rapid-fire, mind-numbing speech stringing together one obscenity after another; the mindless predator with the smooth, tight-muscled, coal-colored skin, armed to the teeth with every conceivable weapon of destruction, ready to blow you away for no other reason than because he felt like it.
Jamaal Washington did not look like that at all. His hair was cut close and clean. He had no scars, no tattoos, none of the markings that serve as a badge of honor among the grown-up children for whom death has become the only meaning of life. He was sound asleep in the starched white sheets of a white-lacquered hospital bed, his light brown hand resting across his abdomen, an I.V. connected to his arm. A metal tray was suspended partway over the narrow bed. A straw dangled out of a half-pint juice container, and a white plastic spoon was stuck in a half-eaten Jell-O cup. The curtain was pulled back and the early afternoon light streamed through the iron-barred window.
There was one chair in the room and I moved it close to the side of the bed. I started to wake him up but then changed my mind. There was no hurry, and I wanted a chance to think. My cousin, whom I had seen less than half a dozen times since the summers we used to spend together as kids, had a partner who wanted me to defend the son of someone he said he had known for years in a case that every lawyer should have wanted to have and none of them wanted to take. Each time I asked Albert Craven the reason he wanted me, an outsider, to take the case, he deflected the question with vague allusions to future discussions that would explain all I needed to know about the way things worked in San Francisco. He was no more specific about why he was willing to pay for the defense of someone all of the prominent attorneys in town were apparently afraid to defend. He shrugged it off as if it were something anyone would do for someone who had been a longtime friend. He sat behind that monstrosity of a desk he had been too kindhearted to get rid of and let you believe that he was someone of whom others had often taken advantage but, because he had gotten used to it, had learned somehow not to mind. Craven was charming and urbane, but whether there was anything beneath that engaging manner was a question I could not yet answer.