Paul Madriani: The Jury Part 33

He turns, heads toward his car, swinging his briefcase as he walks. From behind, looking at him in the fading light of day, Harry is the vision of a kindergarten kid on his way home from school.

chapter.

nineteen.

i pick up Sarah at school, and we have dinner at the mall. She has plans to go to a friend's house for an overnight birthday party, so we do some shopping for a present and head home. She gathers up her things, showers and changes while I hone my skills as a gift wrapper.

By seven-thirty I drop her off at her friend's house and head for the office. I have learned to use downtime, when Sarah is away with others, to get work done so that I can maximize my time with her. My daughter is growing up in front of my eyes. There is not much time left. One day I will look and she will not be there, off at college or married.

I decide to straighten up the office, get a little work done so that I will be free to do something with her on Sat.u.r.day.

The bright lights on Orange Avenue emit an ethereal glow in the evening mist that drifts in off the Pacific. Heavy traffic is backed up, Friday night, a constant stream of cars pulling into the parking lot across the street at the Del Coronado. Its wedding-cake roof, gingerbread and twinkling lights studded by palm trees, their palmettos swaying on ocean currents, exude an aura of fantasy; spiderweb to the flies of tourists.

On the other side of the street, the quiet side, the blue neon sign for Miguel's Cocina flickers and buzzes as I walk under the adobe archway and through the garden leading to the office.

Harry and I are miles from lawyers' row here. Instead we have taken a small cabaa in the courtyard amidst a number of other businesses. We peddle no image. If clients want to pay for such luxuries, they can do it across the bridge in the large high-rise firms of the city.

Outside our office, the overhead light on the little cabaa porch is on. There are the strains of music from the bar at Miguel's, and the flicker of candlelight coming through the windows of the Brigantine as patrons settle in for dinner.

I climb the two steps to the wooden porch and work my key in the lock. I feel for the light switch in the dark and flip it. The overhead fluorescents flicker on, bathing the outer reception area in bright light.

The kid with the dolly has done his job. Six transfer boxes of doc.u.ments are stacked against the wall, delivered from the courthouse. The lid is off of the one on top. It is lying on the receptionist's desk along with a bunch of papers strewn out next to it. Harry must have come back to the office after all, gotten tired and left. I'm wondering if he's at Miguel's or the bar at the Brigantine. If so, he'll be back.

We have had to rent a large storage shed a few miles away to archive doc.u.ments, and we are already running out of s.p.a.ce. Monday the secretaries will go through these boxes with Harry, thin out the essentials, trash the rest and have the kid with his truck pack them away in storage. One of the secretaries will code the boxes with numbers and enter a description of the contents into a computer file so that if we have to go looking, we can find what we need. We will save these for at least six years. The friendliest client on the planet can sue you for malpractice. Lawyers on appeal in criminal cases will tell you that you have an obligation to admit to being incompetent counsel if that will help your client get out of the joint. I have never succ.u.mbed to this philosophy, though I will turn my records over to them without hesitation if they wish to look.

I leave the boxes and head for the disaster that is my office. I open the door, swinging it wide, turn on the light, stand and stare. For weeks I have been stacking up correspondence, putting things off until after Crone's trial. The surface of my desk looks like the floor of a pulp mill. There is paper everywhere.

It's always the problem, where to start? I hang my coat up, roll up my sleeves and start with the in basket. I grab a stack of papers, incoming letters. The secretary has opened each of these envelopes, the contents taken out and unfolded then stapled together in the upper left-hand corner along with the envelope in case a postmark date is critical. The basket is overloaded and separate stacks of unanswered letters lie in piles next to the wooden tray.

I work with the correspondence in one hand, a small portable dictating device in the other. The device is missing its mini-ca.s.sette. I check the drawer of my desk. I'm out.

I head out to the reception area and start rummaging through drawers for an empty ca.s.sette. That's when I hear it. The sound of a metal filing drawer sliding closed, then clicking shut. It comes from Harry's office down the hall. He's slipped in, and I didn't see him.

I head toward the office, open the door; Harry is silhouetted, for some reason standing in the dark behind his desk.

"Why don't you turn the light on?"

He doesn't answer. I stand there smiling, Harry in the dark, some kind of a weird f.u.c.king thing on his head. The thought that enters my mind-latest Harry toy, shooting a bright beam of light onto his desk. His head comes up, and the beam catches me square in the eyes. I shield them with one hand. Then I realize it isn't Harry. The figure is too big, boxy shoulders, the rest of him lost in shadows. All I can see is an outline cast against the light coming in through the window from Miguel's behind him.

For a fleeting instant we are frozen, time and s.p.a.ce, standing there looking, adrenaline beginning to kick in, fight or flight, chemistry acting.

He makes his decision, heads for the open window behind him, knee on the credenza. In an instant half of his body is through the open window, agile and quick for a man so large.

"Who the h.e.l.l . . . ?" Careless bravado, I'm around the desk. I step on something large and soft. I trip, lash out with one hand at the intruder's upper body before he can clear the window. I catch him by one hand just above the wrist. The stupid things we do. I lose my grip, but my fingers latch onto something in his gloved hand, a file, papers. Bare skin against cloth, I win, the file comes free.

Before I realize what is happening, I feel the shock. With the other fist clenched he hits me dead center in the chest. The impact is like a freight train moving through. I sail back against the desk, hitting it with my b.u.t.t, landing flat on my back on the top. The pressure in my sternum makes me think he's broken something. The last thing I see is the bright light on his head as it focuses on me, eyes blinded, blackness beneath the light. Then he is gone.

It takes an instant or two to gather myself, adrenaline doping the body, killing the pain. I stumble back to my feet, lean out the window. There is a fleeting beam of light bobbing through the bushes, and then it too is gone.

I stumble around the other side of the desk toward the front door, my forearms crossed, holding my chest, wheezing to catch my breath, fighting off the pain. I get to the door, open it; one foot in front of the other, I stagger out onto the porch. Bracing myself against the railing, I look in the direction of the arched gate, out toward the street. There is nothing. Music and voices of merriment are still coming from Miguel's. Whoever it was is gone.

It takes me a couple of minutes sitting in the outer office, my knees shaking, before I am certain nothing is broken. I remove my shirt and check my chest in the mirror of the bathroom. There is already a lump forming in the center. There is a sharp pain when I touch it, like a separation. By tomorrow I will have a bruise the size of Connecticut. There's a contusion on my back near the kidneys that I didn't feel until now, where something sharp from the top of the desk caught me when I fell.

I walk slowly down the hall toward Harry's office to survey the damage. I steady myself by holding on to the walls, reach around the corner of the door for the light switch and turn it on.

Inside, the place is a mess. There are papers and files on the floor behind Harry's desk, part of the contents of one of the filing cabinets dumped there. Books from the credenza have been knocked to the floor and a desk lamp lies next to them, its bulb shattered.

It's not until I enter the room with the lights on that I see him. There on the floor on the other side of the desk is Harry's crumpled body.

chapter.

twenty.

i move around the desk, stepping on papers as I go, and kneel down behind Harry's body on the floor. He is curled in a fetal position, motionless. My first instinct is to look for the rising signs of respiration. Is there movement? I glance at the wrinkles in his shirt. I can't be sure, vacuous hope, what the brain wants the eyes to see.

I lean over him, roll him onto his back. His eyes are closed. I lift one lid gently with my thumb. The eyeball has rolled back into his head. I cannot get a fix on his pupils.

The eyeball rotates down, like the tumbler of a slot machine clicking into place. Harry stirs, a hand comes up reflexively to shield his eyes from the brightness of the lights overhead. He groans.

I brace his back, sitting him up. "Easy. Don't try to get up."

"What the h.e.l.l hit me?" he asks.

I feel around the base of his neck. He flinches when I touch it. "Jeez. Careful."

Harry has a lump at the base of his skull the size of an orange.

"Something hard," I tell him. "Did you get a look at his face?"

"Uh-uh." He reaches for the back of his head, touches it gingerly, then checks his fingers for blood. There isn't any.

"Last thing I remember," he says, "I came through the front door, out there. I think I was turning on the lights. Then nothing."

The man clubbed Harry as he came through the door in the office, then dragged his unconscious body back here to get him out of the way.

"Did he take anything?"

"I don't know."

"What about you?" Harry is looking at my shirtless body.

"I had a little more warning," I tell him. "Not that it did me much good."

"Did you see him?"

"Only shadows," I tell him. "And his fist. It was real big, and hard. How are you feeling?"

"I won't know 'til I try to get up," he says. Harry is propped against the wall, behind the desk. He brings his knees up to brace himself. I help him to his feet.

Harry groans. I settle him into the desk chair. He lowers his head. The blood rushes in. "Feels like a building fell on me."

"You're not going to be feeling great for a couple of days. Maybe we should go to emergency."

"No."

"You could have a concussion."

"Ever seen that place on a Friday night? We'd sit there 'til morning. They'd send me home and tell me to take two aspirin."

He stretches his neck, turning it from side to side, making sure it still works. "All I need is a new head," he says.

With some pain I manage to get the window behind his desk closed and latched. I can see scratches at the top of the double-hung lower wooden frame where it has been jimmied.

We could call the cops and have them dust it for prints, but it would be a waste of time. The man was wearing gloves. I could feel them on one hand as I grabbed him, just before the other fist nailed me.

I step over the mess, back to the front of the desk, looking down at a manila folder, not legal, but letter sized. Its contents are still fastened inside with an Acco clip, punched through the top of the folder and taped. It's the file I ripped from the intruder's hand when he hit me.

With some pain, I reach down and pick this up. The folder has no label; instead, the words "Grant Application" are penciled on the tab in a familiar hand-my own.

I open it and begin to flip pages. Ninety seconds later, eleven pages in, the pieces suddenly begin to fit into place.

I take the file out into the other room. There on the receptionist's desk next to the lid for the open box are some of the financial doc.u.ments for Crone's work, the annual financial reports. These were in our evidence boxes. I look at the file in my hand and the most recent annual statement.

Given what they knew, the innocent genetic information pa.s.sing between Tash and Crone from jail, Tate and his prosecutors concluded that William Epperson killed himself. It may be the biggest mistake Tate has made in years.

Harry is still doubled over in the chair in his office, trying to get the buzz out of his head as I come back into his office. I reach for the phone, call information. I look at my watch; it is now almost nine. The automated voice comes on at the other end. "What city?"

I take a guess, "La Jolla."

"What name?"

"Aaron Tash." What I really want is his home address.

"Just a moment please."

A couple of seconds pa.s.s with dead air on the line.

"Who are you calling?" asks Harry.

Before I can respond, a voice comes on the phone.

"Sorry, we have no listing for that name."

"Try San Diego."

"Just a moment." She checks.

"Sorry. Nothing."

He could live in Escondido, or up in Carlsbad, anywhere. There are a dozen different directories.

"Thanks." I hang up; think for a moment. I pick up the phone again, dial another number. In my mind I am trying to consider what I will say if anyone answers. It rings five times. No one picks up. I let it ring seven, then nine times. There's n.o.body home. I consider the dark possibilities. I don't want to think about it.

"Who are you calling?"

"Do we have a home number or an address for Aaron Tash?"

"I don't know. Probably," says Harry. "Process server would have gotten it for service."

"Do you think you could find it?"

"It's probably in one of the boxes outside." Harry stumbles to his feet. I steady him. Together we work our way to the outer office.

I put my shirt on while Harry rummages through the boxes. It takes him awhile. He has to sit to get his bearings, legs like rubber. Several minutes later he finds what he's looking for, a return of service on a subpoena we had served on Tash in case we needed him as a witness.

He turns the form over and puts it on the reception desk in front of me. Tash's home address is listed. I was right. He lives in La Jolla. His phone number must be unlisted.

"How are you feeling?"

"Better," he says.

"Are you up to a ride?"