“No, I don’t want to tell you what happened,” Palmer said. “I think it would be better if you leave.”
I closed my briefcase. “You’re not going to be rid of me that easily. I will remain your attorney until we can go to court to sever the relationship, and then the judge is going to want to know all kinds of things, like what kind of preparation you have to represent yourself. And frankly, Mr. Palmer, I’d be remiss if I didn’t-”
“Tell me how stupid I’m being for taking this on alone, I know.” He gave me half a smile. It was condescending. I’d never met an arsonist capable of being condescending before. “But you’re the one who pleaded me not guilty.”
“You weren’t exactly talking,” I said. “I even gave you a moment to give me some kind of response, and you didn’t say a word. So I gave my standard answer. Not guilty. We can always modify the plea later. Do you have medical records that would show mental health treatments-”
“I wasn’t going to plead out to a mental defect,” he said.
My hand froze on top of the briefcase. “You were going to plead guilty? Why in the hell would you do that, Mr. Palmer?”
He shrugged. “It seemed like the only thing to do.”
“Look, I don’t know the details of your case, Mr. Palmer. The file hasn’t come up to our offices yet. So I don’t know what they have on you. But let me tell you, I’ve seen some supposedly tight police cases unravel in court. It might look hopeless now, but I can assure you that with good counsel we should be able to fight this. So let me-”
“I’m not suicidal or stupid,” he said. “I have no defense.”
I’d heard that before too, usually from guilty clients who felt remorse.
“I’ll decide that,” I said, and flicked the locks on the briefcase so the top popped open again. I pulled out the legal pad that had Palmer’s name on it and indictment scrawled almost illegibly in my handwriting. “Just tell me your side of the events.”
“The events, Mr. Lundgren?” He raised his eyebrows at me. I had a sense that I have had only rarely, that I was sitting across from someone with an intellect more formidable than mine.
“Where were you? What happened? What exactly are they accusing you of? That kind of thing.”
“You heard what they’re accusing me of. They think I burned down the Brickstone mansion and killed everyone inside.”
I hadn’t known it was the Brickstone mansion. When I was an undergrad at Northwestern, my buddies and I used to climb over the ivy-and-moss covered stone fence onto the three-block expanse of yard owned by the Brickstones. We’d walk to the edge of Lake Michigan, plop behind a group of giant rocks that blocked that section of the shore from the mansion proper, and proceed to get very drunk. We’d see who could drink the most and still be awake for sunrise.
Usually that would be me.
“The Brickstone mansion,” I repeated, trying to put this together. “They say you burned it down?”
I expected him to tell me that was a figure of speech. In fact, so convinced was I that that was going to be his next sentence that I almost missed his actual one:
“To the ground.” His tone was dry. “Nothing left but charred remains.”
I frowned at him. That made no sense. The Brickstone mansion was in Chicago ’s city limits-and any building in the city limits had to be made of stone. The famous Chicago Fire left its legacy: No building could be made of combustible materials.
And I’d seen the Brickstone mansion. It was well named. It was made of a kind of white stone you didn’t find outside of the Midwest, but the wealthy in Chicago seemed to adore it. Each “brick” was the size of an armchair, and when I looked at them one drunken dawn, those giant stones gleamed whitely in the light of the rising sun.
“Did you see it?” I asked. “What was left?”
“Of course I saw it,” he said. That look was making me uncomfortable. I was beginning to feel as if I truly was dumber than he was.
“And was it burned to the ground?”
“Nothing left except rubble,” he said.
“You smelled of gasoline when I met you, Mr. Palmer,” I said.
He shrugged.
“Gasoline fires burn hot.”
He looked down.
“But they can’t melt stone. You want to tell me what’s going on?”
He lifted his head. His mouth was open slightly, as if he hadn’t expected real thought from me. “I burned down the Brickstone mansion,” he said. “Killing everyone inside.”
I no longer believed him. “How?”
“What do you want me to do? Say I waved my magic wand, brought down lightning from the heavens into a puddle of magicked up gasoline, and caused the building to explode?”
It was my turn to shrug. “That’s about the only thing that would reduce that white brick mansion to rubble.”
“Well, then,” he said, crossing his arms. “That’s exactly what I did.”
We left it at that. I couldn’t get him to tell me anything else, and I didn’t really try, because he seemed to have dumped the idea of firing me. He didn’t exactly say I could stay, but he nodded when I said I’d be back after I had a chance to review the file.
I took that as a change of heart. We were now attorney and client, whether either of us liked it or not.
So I went back to the office in hopes of finding the file. It was on my desk along with six other brand-new case files, eight old case files, and the seven cases I’d been trying desperately to plead out. My office was a graveyard of active files. They trailed off my desk to boxes on the floor, accordion files on my chair, and half-opened file cabinet drawers beneath my window.
I wasn’t exactly overworked. Overworked would mean that I had some free time to look forward to. My workload was impossible, which made it exactly like everyone else’s workload inside the Public Defender’s office.
Which meant that the minute I saw all those piles of paper, I should have forgotten about Palmer. But I didn’t. In fact, I grabbed his file first.
It was incomplete. A lot of the paperwork had little typed notations TK which, oddly enough, meant “to come” (I always thought: shouldn’t that be TC? Probably too close to TLC, something the police department did not believe in.) A few sticky notes explained that the documentation was being copied, and one handwritten note said that the arson squad planned to finish its investigation tomorrow and would have a detailed report by the end of the week.
And pigs would fly out of my butt.
But I made do with what I had. I often got incomplete files, especially on cases as new as this one. Sometimes the police department felt they’d done enough and would “forget” to update me. So every morning, I made a list of cases that needed additional material, and I’d talk to a clerk, who’d talk to a squad leader, who’d talk to a detective, who would sigh and fill out the necessary paperwork.
The more times I had to do that, the more the detective got irritated at me, so that by the time we went to court, I was usually as big a bad guy in the detective’s eyes as the person he arrested. Fortunately for me, detectives, while smart, aren’t all that articulate, and I can-if I choose-slice one of them into tiny little pieces on the stand.
I don’t always choose. Because if I do, that detective and his buddies’ll be gunning for me on the next case. So I reserve such treatment for special cases.
I had a hunch this was one those.
Special. How I hated that word.
But I stopped feeling sorry for myself and started to make notes about all I could glean from the file.
At 12:13 A.M., neighbors near the Brickstone Mansion (and you’d have to be stretching it to call them neighbors, considering the three-block lawn, the half-mile driveway, and the large stone fence blocking the view) called 911 to report flames shooting into the sky “so high that it looked like the entire North Side is on fire.” A few boats on Lake Michigan called in a massive fire as well.