Claim of Innocence Page 8

  Amanda.

  Amanda.

  Amanda.

  Valerie tried to keep her friend at bay, tried not to let the memory ravage her. But everything led her back to Amanda. To Bridget. Her life had been led with them, next to them, for so long.

  She knew she had to eat. She let herself think of Amanda then, tried not to let the memory cut her. What would Amanda do?

  Like her, Amanda had loved to cook. She was always reading recipe magazines, taking classes at the Chopping Block or asking Valerie to teach her one of the Mexican dishes she had learned from her father.

  If Amanda had been standing here at her fridge, what would she do, Valerie asked herself?

  She permitted herself a short laugh. Amanda, whom they often called “Demanda” because she always knew what she wanted, would put her hand on her hip and consider the food and the leftovers. She would be wearing designer jeans, a casual shirt and lots of the blingy accessories she loved and pulled off with aplomb. She would have said something like, “Don’t you have any potatoes? What about some fresh herbs?” Then she would have turned around before Valerie even answered and said, “Never mind.”

  And then what would she have done?

  Valerie looked at the contents of the refrigerator again and concentrated in a way she knew Amanda would have. She scanned all the random bits, putting them together in different ways.

  She took out the tortilla, and steamed it back to life. She cracked open a couple of eggs and whipped them with the milk, then scrambled them. She sliced the strip steak into thin ribbons and sautéed them with the mushrooms and garlic. Then she put everything in the tortilla, wrapped it tight the way her father had taught her, dug some salsa from the back of her refrigerator and sat down with her steak-and-egg burrito.

  “Thanks, Manny,” she said out loud to the silent house. “Manny” was the other nickname Amanda had. One only Valerie used. She couldn’t even remember how it had started.

  As Valerie took her first bite, she heard the front door open and footsteps in the hallway. She felt herself smile and her face open up, as only one thing could make her do so these days. “Hello, Layla.”

  Her coltish, beautiful daughter smiled as she entered the kitchen, then came forward and kissed her on the cheek. Layla slid her tall frame into a chair.

  “How are you doing, little one?” Valerie asked, even though Layla wasn’t little anymore. Far from it.

  Layla looked worried. She always looks worried now. How horrible for her child to have to agonize about her. It was what Valerie had hoped to avoid as a mom. But there was no way around it, and the truth was that she appreciated the concern. She had learned to relax around her daughter, to let Layla see her frailties. They had been through so much.

  Layla didn’t answer the question. “How was today?” Layla asked.

  Layla had three classes that day at DePaul, and although she’d been in court every other day of the trial, Valerie had refused to let her miss school.

  “Today…” Valerie dialed her mind back, saw Maggie Bristol facing the courtroom. She liked the spitfire spirit of that girl. Then she saw Izzy McNeil and that tiny pinpoint of light got a little bigger. She wanted to talk to her, to tell her the truth.

  But then she remembered that even if she told the truth, even if Izzy believed her, she couldn’t prove it. And the truth was…well, the truth was something she could not let anyone know.

  20

  I called Mayburn as soon as I awoke on Saturday morning. “Meet me for breakfast?”

  Theo was still asleep. I heard him mutter a soft, “No, stay here,” felt him slide across the bed, weaving his arm around my waist. His body felt warm as it cupped mine. He angled himself so we were puzzle pieces that fit perfectly. Had Sam and I ever felt like this?

  “Yeah, fine,” I heard Mayburn say. “Where?”

  Theo pushed himself against my back. I felt all of him now, felt him growing hard. I couldn’t think. “You decide,” I said into the phone.

  “Salt & Pepper Diner. On Lincoln. Half an hour?”

  Theo’s lean, muscled body curled tighter around me. He lifted my hair and began to kiss the back of my neck.

  “An hour,” I said. Theo pushed his pelvis into mine and began to nudge my legs open. “An hour and a half,” I said.

  Salt & Pepper Diner looked like Chicago in the 1950s—red leather booths and a shiny silver counter where you could sit and watch men in white paper hats cooking pancakes.

  After my time with Theo, I was famished. “I’ll have the Popeye omelet,” I said to the waitress, handing her my menu.

  “Toast or grits?”

  They sounded delicious. “Both.”

  Mayburn handed over his menu. “Scrambled eggs. Egg whites only, please.”

  “Toast or grits?”

  “Neither.”

  “Fruit?” the waitress offered.

  He shook his head silently.

  “Sliced tomato?”

  He didn’t even look at her. Just shook his head again.

  I gave him a once-over. He was thinner than usual. His brown hair, which he’d been wearing stylishly messed over the last year, was hidden under a Blackhawks baseball cap. The dark blue jeans and the polo shirt he wore hung on him, when he usually wore things more fitted. Mayburn was at least ten years older than me, I knew, but right now he looked more than that. The lines around his eyes were set deep.

  “What’s up?” Mayburn said.

  I thought about asking the same thing, but I knew he preferred to deal with work first. He wasn’t someone who disclosed his personal business very easily. I told him how Maggie had recruited me to work on Valerie’s case, that we needed his help.

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  “I’m not exactly sure.” I thought about Valerie’s face when she said, I didn’t do it. Maggie said we didn’t have to know such things as Valerie’s criminal lawyers, but I was having trouble separating myself as a person from myself as a lawyer. I’d never had such a struggle when I was a civil lawyer.

  “Let’s break it down,” Mayburn said, leaning forward. “Just start at the beginning.”

  I took a sip of water, and then I told him everything I knew, which wasn’t that much, really. I wondered how Maggie could do this on a regular basis. How did she work with such a relatively limited amount of information from her clients? When I was a civil lawyer and I had a trial, I knew exactly what every witness would say because I’d taken their depositions or I’d made them fill out interrogatories or both. The trials there were more about shading the information, drawing out some bits and burying others to persuade the jury that your side was right. But this criminal thing was a whole different matter. There had been no depositions and little other pretrial testimony to plan our trial strategy. We had no idea what was going to happen. We couldn’t plan, couldn’t pretend we were in control of anything.

  It struck me that the same was true of life—you could attempt to be in control of all the information that came at you, could even attempt to control the direction of it, but ultimately, you realized that life was unpredictable as a jury in Cook County. Control was an illusion.

  Mayburn listened. He leaned toward me when he seemed to need clarification; he nodded when he got it.

  When I came to the end of what I knew about the case, I said, “That’s it, basically. Our client says she didn’t commit the crime. So far, she won’t say who did, or if she even knows who did. We don’t know if she’s lying, and Maggie tells me none of this matters. But I want to know. So I guess we need to look at everybody in the case. Everybody.”

  “What if I dig up something bad about Valerie? Something that’s not out there yet? Do you have to tell Maggie?”

  I chewed my bottom lip the way Maggie did when she was thinking hard. “I think so. But I’m not sure. I just know that I might have to take a backseat on the case or maybe get off it altogether if I don’t personally believe Valerie.”

  “You sure you want to go down th
is road?”

  The waitress delivered our food. We thanked her, but neither of us picked up our forks.

  “I have to.” I nodded, then repeated, “I have to. Can we start with background checks on all the players?”

  “Sure.” Mayburn pulled out a pen and a tiny notebook from his back jeans pocket. “Name ’em.”

  “Bridget and Valerie and Amanda, the victim.” I thought about the photos the state had used during opening arguments. Amanda appeared to be the kind of person Maggie and I would be friends with. The fact that I was representing someone who had allegedly killed her was jarring. I needed to know the real story. “Zavy, the husband. They had a live-in nanny named Sylvia Zowinski.” I spelled her name for Mayburn. “And…” My voice trailed off as I thought hard. “Those seem to be the people who might know something.”

  “If you can get social security numbers, the states they’ve lived in, birth dates, anything…” Mayburn said.

  “I’ll collect what I can from Valerie and the police records. I’m going to be studying the records all weekend to get ready to cross Vaughn.”

  “Detective Damon Vaughn?” That drew the first smile of the day from Mayburn. “I gotta be there to see that.”

  “Monday morning.”

  He gave a smile and a long nod. “If you give me Maggie’s files, I’ll read them and see what I can find.”

  “There’s not much there. But hey, you’re the one who always says investigations are like puzzles, and you just have to start collecting the pieces, right?”

  He raised his eyebrows with a grudgingly impressed expression. “I thought you didn’t listen to me.”

  “I don’t listen to you when doing so will get me in trouble.”

  He scoffed. “Like when?”

  “Are you kidding? What about when you made me get into Lucy’s house and download Michael’s hard drive and Michael came home? There was no time for the series of checks you told me to run. I couldn’t listen to you.”

  He chuckled a little. We looked at each other. I think both of us heard the words—Lucy, Michael—hanging there.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “How am I doing?” Mayburn echoed. “I am doing distinctly shitty.”

  “Will you be okay?”

  “No.” He said it simply, not like he was feeling sorry for himself, but rather like he was being matter-of-fact. “I’ve always wondered what was wrong with me, why I didn’t want to commit to someone before this.”

  “You wanted to commit to that gallery owner you dated. What was her name?”

  “Madeline Saga. I guess you’re right. I did want her to commit. I even bought my house in Lincoln Square hoping she’d move in. But in retrospect, I think I wanted that because she told me she didn’t. It was the ultimate challenge.”

  I looked at Mayburn, at his sad face, his eyebrows drawn together. His skin appeared grayish now that I looked closer, as if he wasn’t hydrated.

  “Have you been boozing?” I asked.

  A sharp glare. “What do you think, McNeil? The love of my life left me. Yeah, I’ve been drinking. Wanna talk more about it?”

  I shook my head, raised my hands in surrender. Mayburn’s show of emotion was unlike him, so much so that I suddenly felt a need to help. Aside from when he was with Lucy, Mayburn seemed happiest to me when he was involved with work. “Why don’t you do some investigating for me?”

  “I am. You’ve got me on this poison case.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I need you on something else. It’s Sam.”

  His narrowed eyes went wide. “Your ex-fiancé, Sam? The one who disappeared?”

  “He’s reappeared.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s engaged now.”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound like much of a reappearance for you.”

  “He said he’ll break off his engagement if I want.”

  Now, Mayburn’s face turned to disbelief. “Are you telling me that you’ve got a boyfriend and you can get your other boyfriend back?”

  I thought about it, agreeing that my situation probably was unhelpful when set up against his. “I’m a mess!” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. “More than anything, I’m confused,” I said, which was precisely true. “I need you to help me with…”

  “With what?”

  “I want to know how serious he is. About me. About Alyssa.”

  “Well, ask him.”

  “I will. But tell me what to look for. Tell me what to ask. You work on all these infidelity cases. I mean, c’mon!” My voice had risen. I realized then that I was anxious to make the right decision—Sam, Theo, or none of the above?

  Mayburn’s face softened. “When are you seeing Sam next?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  Now Mayburn looked concerned. “Let me know,” he said. “Let me know where you’re going and what you’re doing. And then I’ll help you. I promise.”

  21

  I parked my Vespa in my garage, thinking about Mayburn and Lucy, thinking that the most important thing about relationships, it seemed, was timing, timing, timing.

  What that meant for me and Theo, or me and Sam, I had no idea.

  I put my silver helmet on the shelf and left, locking the door to the garage behind me. I juggled the keys, looking for my house key as I walked from the detached garage down the brick pathway at the side of my house. I was slightly distracted, thinking about Theo and Sam. But right as I came to the corner, exactly at the point where I would turn and be twenty feet from the front door, I felt someone.

  I thought of my mother’s words about gut instincts. I stopped. I leaned my ear toward the front of the house. Heard nothing.

  I took a tiny step, then another and another until I could ever so slowly peek my head around the side of the building.

  There was a man sitting on my front steps, his back to me, his head hanging low, as if to get his face out of the August sun that scorched the stairs. Or to hide who he was?

  I pulled myself back behind the building. Should I leave? Maybe get back on the Vespa and drive by to see who it was?

  I peeked my head back again. His face was still obscured. He was a big guy, but I could see love handles under the white shirt he wore. I could probably outrun him if I had to.

  I stepped into clear view. “Can I help you?”

  The man turned.

  “Spence?”

  He stood and smiled weakly. His face was flushed from the heat, but otherwise he looked like the usual Spence. But the fact that he was here, at my house, was unusual. Occasionally, Spence and my mom came for dinner, especially when I’d dated Sam, but their house was nicer and larger than mine, and it was the place they were most happy.

  “Darling girl,” Spence said.

  “Is something wrong?” Suddenly, I felt a lightning-flash of pain. What if someone had died?

  “No, nothing’s wrong. I don’t think.” A pause. “I just came to talk to you.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  I led him upstairs. By the landing of the third floor, Spence was huffing with exertion. The stairs were another reason they didn’t often visit.

  Inside, Spence sat on the couch while I retrieved glasses of ice water. I handed one to him, then sat on my favorite yellow-and-white chair. “What’s up?”

  “I was just at church.” Spence went to Old St. Pat’s frequently, sometimes during the week and on Saturdays, like today, in addition to every Sunday. My mother usually opted out. She always said she’d lost her taste for religion after my father died—or after we thought he was dead. “During the homily,” Spence continued, “the priest talked about asking for help, about how it was important to do that. So, I guess I came here for…for some help.”

  “I’d do anything for you, Spence. You know that. What do you need?”

  A sheepish expression. “I believe I just need to talk. To someone who understands your mother.”

  “Well, I don’t know if anyone really understands her. E
ven her.”

  He laughed. “She is an enigma. It was what drew me to her initially.”

  “You’re the person who knows her best now.”

  He gave a single nod in acknowledgment. “After we met, she flowered. At least that’s how I saw it. She let me in. I understood her moods, and I didn’t mind them. In fact, I loved her for them.”

  I felt a searing regret. I used to feel like that about Sam’s failings, and he felt the same way. I knew what it felt like to have someone love me for me. Early in our relationship, I saw that Sam was enthralled with me. I had feared if I showed him too much, that enthrallment would turn to irritation and maybe even disgust. Allowing him to see my flaws had been terrifying. But when he didn’t flinch from anything, it was thrilling.

  “You’ve been wonderful for my mom, Spence. You know that. So what’s happening?”

  He took a long sip of water, then placed the glass back on the white plaster coaster I’d given him. He sat back and sighed, looking straight ahead. “She’s different.” His head turned, and his eyes met mine. Those blue eyes looked tired, weary and a little frightened. “You’ve seen it, too, I know.”

  “I’ve noticed it since he came back.”

  We didn’t need to say who “he” was.

  “Yes,” Spence said.

  “It’s a confidence she didn’t used to have, don’t you think?”

  He nodded.

  “But Spence, I don’t believe that’s such a bad thing.”

  His face went stricken. “I feel terrible saying this, but it’s bad for me.” He hung his head, shaking it back and forth. “I don’t know how I fit into her life when she’s…when she’s like this.”