Hardy straightened, his back stiff up against the cell wall. “You’re being too hard on yourself, Maya. It was a long time ago.”
She shook her head. “It’s yesterday,” she said. “It’s this morning. It’s now, for God’s sake. Don’t you understand? I killed her. My mom’s sister. Kathy’s sister and her unborn child. Everybody’s favorite.”
“It was an accident.”
“I was stoned and drunk. Both. Loaded. It was murder.”
“And you’ll never forgive yourself for it.”
“Why should I? I did it. Would you?”
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth. Maybe after all this time I’d be tempted to start trying.”
“Time hasn’t made it go away.”
“It might if you shared the burden of it. If you told somebody. Maybe you need absolution.”
“I pray for it every day.”
“It’s not going to come without some kind of confession.”
“What? Now you’re a priest?”
“Not even close,” Hardy said. “Just a fellow sinner like yourself. But I was raised a good Catholic. Believe me, I know how the forgiveness thing works.”
“You ever kill anybody?”
Hardy nodded. “I was in Vietnam. I killed a lot of people.” Including not just in Vietnam, he thought, but also the victims of the horrific gunfight he’d been part of here in San Francisco, the after-math of which had dominated his emotional stability and career for the next three or four years. So, yes, he’d killed his share of people. And kept his share of secrets too. A plague of them, he sometimes felt. But Frannie, his children, Glitsky, Roake-they all knew what he’d done, had worked through the consequences together, and that had helped.
Maya shook her head. “Vietnam was killing in a war.”
“What? Like that doesn’t count? It felt like it counted, trust me. I know it did to the families of my victims. I know it did to me.” He drew in a breath. “My only point is I think maybe keeping this secret has hurt you enough. Look at the power it gave Dylan Vogler.”
“I hated that man.”
“I’d imagine so. He was in the car with you?”
She nodded. “It was his car. No connection to me. He just washed it up and never told anybody. The bastard.”
“When did the blackmail start?”
“Not until he was out of prison, but right after that. He couldn’t get any other work, not that he really tried, I don’t think. He looked me up and reminded me how much I owed him for his silence.”
“I get it,” Hardy said.
“I don’t know if you do. I don’t know if anybody can.” Her chin fell, a puppet’s string cut. “It never ends. It’s just a constant weight.”
“I don’t want to beat a dead horse, Maya, so I’m only going to say it one more time. You could let it go. Let Joel in, at least. He’s stuck by you through all this, and here maybe thinking you killed somebody too. He loves you. He could handle it.”
She had her arms crossed over her chest, hunched over now, rocking on the hard concrete ledge. “God God God.”
“It’s all right, Maya. It’s all right.”
“No. No, it’s so not all right.” Seconds passed and she slowed herself down in her movements, finally became still. “You’d think I would have been on guard against it. I mean, it was the great myth I was raised with.”
“What was that?”
“Eve. The Garden of Eden. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That’s what it all was to me back when I met Dylan. He was the serpent, just so attractive, so much wiser, I thought. Willing to try anything, you know, for the experience of it. ‘Here, try some of this.’ And I was this kid who’d never done anything, who was just-just so simple, and stupid. And you know what the real stupidity was?”
“What’s that?”
“I really was happy.” She looked over at Hardy, searching his face to see if he understood at all. “I mean, before Dylan. I was a happy person, a good person. But then he’d started challenging and questioning me about everything, about who I was. ‘How can you know you’re as happy as you can be when you haven’t even tried to experience anything outside of your well-ordered little life? Maybe you’re just afraid to find out what real life is about. And if that’s the case, then all your so-called happiness is just cowardice and sham, isn’t it?’ ” Her eyes pleaded with Hardy. “How could I not see what he was doing?”
“It’s seductive, that’s why,” Hardy said. “If it’s any help, I doubt Eve saw it either. She just wanted the knowledge, to taste the forbidden fruit.”
“One little taste. That’s all I wanted. Just to see.”
“Original sin,” Hardy said. “And so you’re not the first to commit it, are you? It goes back a ways, that fall from grace. Some would say it’s the human condition.”
“But it wasn’t who I was ever supposed to be.”
“No,” Hardy said heavily. “No, I don’t suppose it was.”
“That’s the horrible thing. And then Tess.” Her voice broke again. “If I could just have those days back. That day.”
John Greenleaf Whittier’s phrase hovered in Hardy’s consciousness-“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’ ” But he merely draped his arm over his client’s shoulder and drew her in for a moment next to him. “You’ve still got lots of days ahead of you, Maya. Better ones. I promise you.”
Suddenly, the bailiff knocked from the courtroom side and swung the connecting door open. Recognizing the not unfamiliar tableau-a suspect wrung out with emotion, a face nearly disfigured, swollen and red from crying-he stepped into the doorway and leaned over toward Hardy, asking with an unexpected solicitousness, “Everything okay here, sir?”
“If we could get a couple more minutes, I’d appreciate it,” Hardy said. “And maybe some Kleenex.”
31
Stier stood looking down onto Seventh Street from the third-floor window in Clarence Jackman’s office. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
Jackman, obsidian black, stood six feet five inches tall and this morning had grunted in satisfaction when his bathroom scale failed to clear the two-hundred-seventy-pound marker. As always, he was dressed in a well-tailored dark suit and white shirt, today with a maroon-and-dark-blue rep tie. Ignoring Stier’s profanity, Jackman spoke in his low-registered, powerful, quiet voice. “You needed to be told right away. Get it in front of Marian, put the woman on your witness list.”
Stier turned. “Of course. Nothing else to do, really.” He shook his head in disgust. “This was Schiff?”
“Apparently, although Bracco says he’s just as responsible.”
Another dismissive head shake. “Cops. What was she thinking?”
“I really believe she’d convinced herself it was immaterial. The woman seemed senile. Schiff didn’t think you’d want some probably untrue random detail screwing up your story.”
“I don’t care about my story, Clarence. I build the case out of whatever story I’ve got to work with. If it’s got inconsistencies… but, hell, you know this. And it would have been nothing if I laid it out up front. Now it looks like we buried it.”
“I know that.”
Stier slammed his hand on the windowsill. “Shit!”
“Right. But I’m afraid there’s something maybe worse, if you’d like to sit down.”
The request clearly surprised Stier, but this was his boss, so he went where Jackman indicated and sat on the front couple of inches of one of the leather couches. “Shoot,” he said.
“Well, let me start out by admitting a personal bias, which I do try to leave out of my professional duties. Nevertheless, I think you may know, Paul, that Kathy West and I go back quite a way. When I first came on here, she walked me through quite a few minefields on the political side, actually was one of my informal advisers.”
“Well, I-”
Jackman forged his smile of steel and held up a hand, cutting off the interruption. “If I may. My point is that I’ve watched this case develop over the past few months with a lot of interest and a bit of a sense of discomfort, not only because of the inherent weaknesses in the evidence, but because of the media blitz that’s accompanied all of Jerry Glass’s side of things with the mayor and Harlen Fisk and your defendant’s husband.