Hardy: The Suspect Part 11

"Or less."

"All right. I'll be ready."

The two girls used to do a lot of things together, but they'd drifted apart in the past couple of years. Bethany, a highly strung over-achiever, found that she didn't have the energy after her homework and other activities to keep up with Kymberly and her extreme mood swings. When Kymberly was down in the dumps, she was a total drag, often even talking about suicide, and then nodding off if they were trying to do quieter things together, such as studying or baking cookies, or just hanging out. On the other hand, when she was happy, she was recklessly crazy, invincible and immortal, and this was even harder to take-stealing things, making out with guys she didn't even know, doing drugs.

It got so that the only times they could get along easily was when they both were on a hill, skiing or boarding, and even then it was usually Stuart's presence with them that had made them comfortable. He was daredevil enough for his daughter, and controlled enough for Bethany. When the three of them were together, there was lots of action but he'd draw the line when Kymberly wanted them all to, say, ski off a cliff. But by now even those good times were a couple of years in the past, so Bethany was a bit surprised when Kymberly found her on campus at Galileo High School during lunchtime, just walked up to her as she was talking to some of her friends.

"Hey, can we talk a minute?"

"Oh G.o.d, Kymberly. Sure. I... I'm so sorry about your mom."

"Yeah." She was more nicely dressed than Bethany had seen her in a long time, although the expression on her face was strangely vacant. But then, Bethany reminded herself, she'd just lost her mother.

The two of them moved away from the other kids over to a corner of the courtyard. After they sat down on one of the benches against the building, neither of them talked immediately. Then finally Bethany said, "Are you okay?"

"Not really. It's not how I thought it would be. I didn't think it would bother me so much with Mom, you know. I mean ..." Kymberly sighed heavily. "You know."

Bethany nodded. "I don't want to find out."

"You're right, you don't." Kymberly turned her head to look at her friend. There was a lot of unmistakable anger in her face now. "And now my dad's in trouble, mostly because of you."

"Me? What about me?"

"You telling the police you saw him show up at the house."

"Yeah, but I did."

"Okay, but he says he didn't do that." She stared long and hard into her friend's face. "Don't you get it, Bethany? If he did, that makes him look like he killed Mom."

"The cop I talked to said they didn't have any suspects yet."

"Yeah, well they got one now."

Bethany sat still for a long moment. "I didn't mean that. I mean, for that to happen."

"Well, what did you think was going to happen?"

"I don't know. I just answered his questions."

"Well, you gotta change your answers."

"How am I going to do that?"

"Just tell them you made a mistake. You remembered wrong."

"But I didn't, Kym."

"You had to, Bethany. It wasn't my dad. If you say it was, they're going to get him. You can't let that happen."

"But if..."

Kymberly slapped down hard at her own pants leg. "Listen to me! Forget the 'buts' and the 'ifs.' You've got to change what you told them. That's all there is to it."

"You mean lie?"

Kymberly, perhaps frustrated by her inability to get her message across more clearly, fixed her with another menacing glare. "Look, Bethany, it's pretty simple, okay. Either you lie, or . . ."

"Or what?"

"G.o.d, do I have to spell it out for you? Or something really bad is going to happen. Okay? Get it?"

The walk along the Marina from Fort Mason to Crissy Field is perhaps the most scenic stroll in a city justly renowned for its physical beauty. Today, with a cloudless, nearly purple sky above, the vista showed itself at its best.

Stuart and Gina were in shirtsleeves, hands in pockets, keeping up a pace. Before long they'd reached the deep green sycamore and pine hillsides of the Presidio. The pink-domed Palace of Fine Arts presided over the rooftops of the Marina District. To Gina's right, a forest of sailboat masts swayed gently at their berths, while beyond them the shimmering blue bay nurtured the rest of the fleet, a riot of billowing, multicolored sails cutting in and out of one another, flirting often dangerously with the huge transport and/or cruise ships that churned through the channel beneath the impossibly close rusty red cables and steel of the Golden Gate Bridge. In spite of all the full sails out on the water, here on sh.o.r.e only a breath of a breeze blew over them.

The Michael Douglas trivia had not by a long shot dissipated all of the friction between attorney and client from their morning session at Gina's office. Tension had thrummed between the two of them during Juhle's interrogation itself as Gina continually stepped in, answering-or more precisely, advising Stuart not to answer- many of the questions for which Juhle had already gotten answers the day before. Had Stuart loved his wife? Or hated her? Precisely when had she told him she'd wanted a divorce? What had been those exact circ.u.mstances? What time had he come home? Left Echo Lake? How much did he stand to inherit? And so on.

Neither Juhle nor Stuart had appreciated her efforts. It hadn't helped that the only time Gina had thought it appropriate to cooperate fully with Juhle-when he'd wanted to take a saliva swab for DNA-Stuart had strongly objected. In the end, Gina had prevailed. A DNA sample was something that the police could get by search warrant in any event. There was nothing to be gained by refusing to provide one now. Nevertheless, something about it had galled Stuart immensely, and his reaction had brought to a boil again the simmering anger that Gina had been fighting to suppress all morning. If he was innocent as he said, why would he possibly object?

Finally, after Juhle had gone, they'd had the money discussion. Sixty-five thousand down, cashier's check or money order, in her office as soon as possible, but no later than the end of the week. Gina wasn't working for free, and this was going to be taking all of her time if it went to a murder charge. Stuart could of course feel free to find other counsel but, she cautioned him, "Like everything else, you tend to get what you pay for."

Now, to the casual eye, they might have been a long-married couple power-walking for their exercise, making sure they got their hours in, talking of mundane things-the house, the grandkids. But a closer look would reveal a deeper intensity. Stuart had been telling Gina about his daughter-the good and the rather more considerable bad of her.

"Well, which is it, if you had to choose one?" Gina asked. "Wonderful or difficult?"

"That's the thing. She's both. The wonderful part would be her mother's incredible brains and drive and even a goodly portion of the Dryden natural beauty. When she chooses to, she can be very, very pretty, but . . . that leads us to the difficult part. In fact, everything leads to the difficult part." He walked on. "I don't know how to say this without it sounding pretty bad, but she's just never really been easy in any way. We called her the Original High Maintenance Kid. And that's when we were feeling good about her."

"Okay."

"Well, not really okay. You don't even want to hear about her eating habits, which ranged over the years from gorging herself early on to some pretty intense bulimia over the last couple of years. And let's not talk about mastering all the rudiments of hygiene-hair, fingernails, everything else. You know what she was wearing when she got in yesterday? Salvation Army camo."

"That's the style, Stuart."

"All right, but why does she wear that baggy s.h.i.t when she could be ... attractive? I just don't get it."

"Maybe she doesn't want to be attractive. Maybe the attention threatens her. I've got a friend who's the same way. She puts on a dress or wears a tank top and guys driving by crash their cars into things. I've seen it happen. She hates it. I don't think that's so abnormal."

"No, we haven't gotten to the abnormal stuff yet."

"Which is what?"

"The true mental stuff, which is really what nearly broke up Caryn and me a long time ago." Stuart gave Gina the extended version- how during Kym's adolescence, she'd tried their collective patiences with every kind of acting out in the book, until finally Caryn had decided that she suffered from "cla.s.sic" Attention Deficit Disorder and should be on a regular, heavy regimen of Ritalin. "Problem was," he continued, "that I don't really believe in a lot of the versions of ADD that Caryn's high-end medical crowd tends to embrace."

"Embrace as what?"

"A one-size-fits-all explanation for high energy and disruptive behavior in young people. I thought that if my daughter needed attention so badly, maybe it was because she wasn't getting enough from her parents, myself included. So I started to take her places with me, the wilderness, the woods, the usual." He shrugged. "For a while, it seemed to help. And at least I wasn't drugging her."

"So what happened?"

"So, in the end, it turned out that, as usual, Caryn was more right than I was." Now he came to a full stop and looked Gina in the face. "The truth is we found out that Kym's bipolar, which used to be called manic-depressive. She does need to be on a regular dose of lithium, or she doesn't function right in the real world. And unfortunately, the cla.s.sic situation, which she fits, is she forgets or refuses to take her pills. When she's on them, she's okay but everything in life is kind of low-key and boring, and she hates that. She wants the high of being manic. So she stops the pills and crashes and burns. You know that time . . ." But suddenly he stopped, looked out over Gina's head to the cloudless sky. "No," he said all but to himself. "Never mind."

But Gina put a hand on his arm. "Never mind what? What time?"

Stuart sighed and pointed to a bench next to the walkway. "You want to sit a minute?" And he told her what had really happened when the neighbors had called the police five years before, when "plates had gotten thrown."

Pulling a trick out of his writer's bag, Stuart had purposely used the pa.s.sive voice when he'd told Gina about this before. The plates had gotten thrown all right, he said, and Caryn had gotten cut, but he hadn't thrown them-Kymberly had.

And Stuart and Caryn at least agreed that they weren't going to let their daughter be charged in the attack. Her life was going to be difficult enough-even if she got everything together and religiously took her medication-without the added burden of a criminal record. She'd gone off her pills again last summer, and this had precipitated the many huge and highly vocal fights between Kym and both of her parents.

The screaming between male and female voices that the neighbors had heard? It had been Kym and Stuart, daughter and father; not Caryn and Stuart, husband and wife. And when the police had come, he and Caryn had put on the act together, going along as though it had been them fighting-again, to protect their daughter.

He was sitting on the bench, canted forward, staring out into nothing in front of him. A couple of seagulls had landed in the gra.s.s across the path and were raucously fighting over a french fry. Gina cleared her throat. "You could tell this to Juhle, you know. He doesn't think you're a wife-beater, a lot of this goes away."

But Stuart shook his head. "It'd get out. Kym's got enough to deal with."

"It might not get out. Juhle can keep a secret."

"I don't know. I just don't know. Anything." He let out a lungful of air. "You want to be moving again?"

After they'd covered some ground, Stuart continued. "There's just so much guilt about every part of this. I mean, the truth is that Kym's problems-Kym herself, even-got so she poisoned everything with Caryn and me. Caryn went into her world of position and money and I just withdrew so I didn't have to confront it the whole time. When I was around, I'd try to be a good husband and father, I suppose, but I knew that I couldn't do anything to help my daughter, or to make things better with Caryn. It was just what it was. And I was too weak or, I don't know, too . . . too G.o.dd.a.m.n impotent to do anything."

"You thought it was your fault."

"It was my fault. I'm the one who originally wanted a kid so bad. If it had been up to Caryn, it never would have happened, and everything would have been better."

"Maybe not better, Stuart. Maybe just different."

"Another different couldn't have been worse, believe me. No, Kym was my genes. Without that, Caryn and I... s.h.i.t. I don't know."

"And this is where all the anger comes from, isn't it?"

"Some good percentage, I'd say, yeah. Why do you think I had to go away to get 'healed by water'? But then I'd come home and Kym wouldn't have taken her pills and she'd explode at me for something trivial or absolutely imaginary, and the frustration would knock me sideways again. And then Caryn, of course, would blame me if I lost my temper."

Gina had her arms crossed. A breeze had picked up and blew the hair off her forehead. When she spoke, she kept her eyes out on the water. "You said Kym and Caryn were on the outs when she went off to school?"

"Yeah, that happened this past summer." Stuart went on to say that suddenly the sides had shifted and-even on her medication- Kym had begun to fight much more with Caryn than she did with him. She began to use street drugs, self-medicating, the doctors called it. Kym was showing up at home with CDs and jewelry and other stuff they knew she hadn't bought; things around the house began to disappear; she was having more or less random s.e.x, hanging out with difficult friends, constantly ignoring her curfew. Caryn would not have any "daughter of hers" acting that way, since it reflected on her. And in this way Caryn, more than Stuart, had become the hated, the enemy.

And that was how things stood until two weeks ago when, a blessing for both parents, Kymberly had finally gone off to school.

12.

Stuart and Gina had made it down nearly to the Golden Gate Bridge, for the last couple of hundred yards walking in silence. But it was a more comfortable silence than they'd shared up until then. And Gina finally broke it. "So. Your book," she said, "Healed by Water."

"Note the awkward silence," Stuart said, "while the author decides whether he should ask the reader for an opinion or not."

"I've already told you I liked it a lot. But it was more than that. When I finished it-it really touched me. I was just so ... relieved, I guess is the word."

"About what?"

"About taking on a client who was intelligent and innocent. I can't tell you how good that felt. That I'd finally be able to put my legal talents to the service of someone who might actually deserve them." She kept walking, eyes forward, hands in her pockets. "I said something yesterday about losing my fiance a few years ago. Well, since then, not that it matters to you, but. . ."

"Why wouldn't it matter to me?"

"I mean to your defense. In any event, since David, I've been having some trouble committing to things, to getting involved. And then suddenly, last night, I finished your book and was just so glad that I was going to get to do this. I mean, defend an innocent man. Do you know how many innocent clients I've had in twenty-some years as a lawyer?"

"I don't know. Ten? Fifteen?"

"Zero."

Stuart stopped walking, turned to face her. "You've got to be kidding me."

"No. You think that's unusual?"

"No innocent clients ever? Yeah, I'd say so."

"You'd be wrong. It's the norm, believe me. Public defenders, which is how I started, they get a.s.signed cases out of the courtroom, and roughly a hundred percent of these people, they don't even pretend they didn't do what they're charged with. It's all just revolving doors, into and out of jail. They just want to cut a deal to lessen their time, or snitch out somebody to get back on the street, or convince a jury that whatever they did, yeah, they did it all right, but they can't be guilty of doing whatever it was because it just wasn't their fault. They were victims."

"Of what?"

"Anything you can think of, and probably a bunch you can't. Prejudice, bad childhood, Republicans, abusive spouses, drugs and alcohol, addictive personality disorder, s.e.xual dysfunction, dumbs.h.i.t syndrome, you name it. But whatever, the main thing is it wasn't their fault." Gina came to a full stop. "So anyway, last night the thought of getting to defend a righteously innocent client, it kind of filled me up with ... I don't know-motivation. Hope, maybe. Something to try for."

An hour later, as they got back to the Marina, Gina had more to work with. Although Juhle, in his zeal to connect Stuart to his wife's murder, to date hadn't seemed too aware of the maelstrom of drama that apparently swirled in all corners of the life of Caryn Dryden, Stuart had lived inside of it for years. Once he'd gotten his arms around the fact that Caryn had probably been murdered, he amplified quite a lot of the information that they discussed the day before, reinforcing Gina's impression that at least two other people might have had a motive to kill her. Besides those definite two, Stuart told her that he thought it possible that his wife had been having an affair, or maybe serial affairs. Which opened up another whole world of possibilities.

In Stuart's opinion, the most likely suspect to have killed his wife-and for all he knew, to have been sleeping with her too-was her main business partner, Robert McAfee, with whom she had been trying to open her new practice. As Stuart had intimated yesterday, Caryn was trying to bring in a third partner, Michael Pinkert-a mediocre though very rich surgeon. This was infuriating McAfee, who didn't want to work with Pinkert any more than he wanted to split their potential profits three ways. The selling point of the deal for McAfee had always been the efficiency and professionalism and synergy of him and Caryn working together. But Pinkert could bridge the money gap that was threatening their start-up. Caryn and McAfee had taken out insurance policies against their business startup loans, and now with Caryn's death, McAfee would likely be able to open his own clinic and reap all the profits himself.

But even half of her own private clinic was nothing compared to Caryn's other major endeavor. She'd not just been your average, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen orthopedic surgeon. Instead, she was a total joint surgeon, specializing in total hip replacement, or arthroplasty. Beyond that (as if that weren't enough, Stuart had said), she'd done her undergraduate work, and then a couple of years of graduate school before she transferred to med school, in polymer chemistry. Evidently in her spare time, Caryn had invented a new plastic cup-side for the hip joint that marked a significant improvement in the plastic's unfortunate tendency to degrade in the body over time. PII, the company in whose lab she worked, had even named the thing the Dryden Socket, and after FDA approval, which was pending, it looked to become the worldwide gold standard hip joint. As such, projected sales would make it worth millions every year. But, as evidently was almost always the case when the FDA got near giving its final stamp of approval, some problems had surfaced.

Lately Caryn had been far more upset about "her" socket and her dealings with PII and the project's point man with the venture capital crowd-a Palo Alto investment banker named Frederick Furth, who'd arranged the mezzanine loan-than with anything about Bob McAfee.

As Gina had discovered last night, the mezzanine loan had left her cash-poor on her new practice offices when there were the inevitable and unavoidable delays in construction and start-up. And the Dryden Socket apparently remained in limbo.

If these facts and alternative suspects did not directly impact the evidence that Juhle was collecting on Stuart, Gina knew that at least they would be useful in muddying the prosecutorial waters. At this stage, that would be its own reward.

Still some long blocks from the Travelodge, and with most of their legal business out of the way for the moment, Gina found herself coming back to Stuart's books, asking him which was his favorite.

"I like them all," he said. "They're all my babies, you know? But it's gratifying that other people like them too. I'm very lucky I get to do what I do."

"You do it very well. I identified with a lot of it, which I guess is what you're going for."

But Stuart shook his head. "No, I'm not really going for effects on the reader. I'm trying to get to something else. Sometimes I'm not so sure of what it is myself. Clarity, maybe." He shrugged, almost swallowed the next word. "Truth. That sounds arrogant, I know. But it's what I'm trying for. Something real."

"Well, you got that. You really did."