“And I’ve advised the judge not to answer it,” says Lenore. “It’s neither the time nor the place,” she says.
“Such advice assumes that we have a relationship,” says Acosta. “Attorney-client?” He arches an eyebrow.
The man may be depressed, keeper of the emotional dump, but he has not lost his lawyer’s wits.
“You can’t expect me to answer such a question unless. .”
“Consider yourself represented.” Before I can say a word, Lenore takes the bait, hook to the gills.
This draws the flash of a smile from the Coconut: even white teeth against a dark complexion, visions of what a swimmer might see if taken by a shark from below.
He showers this grin on me, as if to say that he himself often partakes of the fruits of chaos. My calculated frontal assault has produced the wrong result, pushing Lenore over the edge.
“You should take your time to consider.” I try to pull her back. “There is a lot you don’t know.”
“Call it intuition.” Lenore gives me a look, all the anger she can muster, focused in a lethal gaze, as if to say that if I can do foolish things, so can she. It is a game of chicken only the Coconut can win.
“Right,” I say.
“How about you, Counselor?” Acosta turns his attention to me.
“How about it?” says Lenore.
“How are you being paid?” I ask her.
“I’ll write you a check right now,” says Acosta. “You want a retainer? How much?” At this moment, pen in hand, hunched with his checkbook open at the corner of my desk, he conjures, with his dark looks, nothing so much as tortured images from Faust, my own deal with the devil.
“A retainer of seventy-five thousand,” I tell him, “in trust. To be billed at two hundred fifty dollars an hour, three-fifty for time in court. Each,” I say.
Lili actually winces.
Lenore’s eyes go wide.
Acosta doesn’t miss a beat. “Done,” he says.
Deeper pockets than I could have dreamed. He starts to write out the check at the edge of my desk.
Having pushed Lenore in, I am now compelled to follow.
“With the understanding that Ms. Goya is lead counsel.” I give her a look, as if to say, “Try them apples.” “And one other caveat,” I say. I would add a thousand more if I could think faster. “If I ever discover we are not being told the truth, we are out of here,” I say.
More stirrings from Lili on the couch, but Acosta now has a firm hold on her arm.
“Now, answer my question,” I tell him.
The expression on his face suddenly goes stone cold. He is a body at rest. All idle movement stops, a defining moment of psychic gravity. You could lose a continent in the depth of his penetrating brown eyes, a gaze like the lock of a missile on its target.
“No. I did not kill her.”
As a rendition of what might be seen in court, should this get that far, it is not bad. I might hope for a little quaking of the voice for sympathy, but as for conviction, it is all there.
“Now that that’s out of the way,” he says, “what do we do next?”
It is suddenly clear to me that he actually has no clue. A man who has spent twenty years in the law, a good part of it on the bench, he has not the slightest hint of a defense.
Lenore discusses first the question of an alibi, some good citizen who could vouch for Acosta’s whereabouts at the time of the murder. This is a problem, as the police have not as yet indicated their best guess as to when Hall was killed. Acosta compounds this, telling us that he was alone much of the day and that evening. Depressed, he’d parked his car at a turnout on the highway near the river. What he was contemplating while doing this he does not say, though the look in his wife’s eye, the glance she sends to Lenore, conveys volumes.
“No one saw you?” says Lenore. “You didn’t talk to anyone?”
“At the time I would have been poor company,” he says. “I wanted to be alone. I was upset.” According to him, he had bottomed out, having been removed from the bench by order of the supreme court the week before. In a fit of frustration he had fired his lawyer on the prostitution charge that morning.
“I understand,” she tells him. “Still, during that entire period, the day she was killed and that evening, you didn’t talk to anybody, by phone? Call a friend? Go anywhere where someone would have seen you?”
He shakes his head.
“Did you purchase anything? Food, gasoline? Perhaps a merchant who might remember you around the time that she died?”
More head shaking.
“What time did you get home that night?” I ask.
“I didn’t. I didn’t return home until the following afternoon. Sometime around two,” he says.
His wife confirms this sorry fact, that she was worried sick during this period.
We question Acosta as to any statements he may have made to the police following the murder. Unfortunately we don’t have the details of his precise words. He tells us that he made some equivocal comments concerning a note with his name on Hall’s calendar. Lenore and I exchange glances when he mentions this. It is the note she had seen that night.
According to Acosta, based on his confused statements, the police are now contending that he knew about this note, and that he was there the evening of the murder.
It is the rule of nature on the order of gravity that the desire to talk when in trouble is always a mistake.
“Is it possible that they have another suspect?” This happy thought is injected by Lenore.
“I don’t think so,” says Acosta.
“How can you be so sure?” she says.
“Because they have convened a grand jury to take evidence, and I have not been called to testify.”
Lenore looks at him slack-jawed. He doesn’t tell us where this information comes from, and we do not ask. The Capital County courthouse has more leaks than a pack of dogs with bad kidneys, and Acosta would of course know where each of these lifts its leg.
“A number of acquaintances have been called as witnesses,” he tells us. “Mind you, I don’t know what they were asked, or what they might have said under oath.”
“Give us a guess,” I say. Cat and mouse.
He gives a little shrug, a tilt of the head, best guess.
“If a prosecutor were to ask the right question, of the right witness. .” He makes a dried prune of his face, all wrinkles around the mouth, conjuring the possible. “One of them,” he says, “might mention certain rash statements. Some intemperate remarks made in a moment of anger.”
I let my silent stare ask the obvious.
“I was upset,” he says. “And I said some things.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t remember the exact words. I might have said something, called her a liar, maybe something worse.”
“Brittany Hall?”
He nods.
“I was angry. They set me up,” he says.
“Who?”
“The cops,” he says. The defense of every john: entrapment.
“The entire prostitution thing was a setup,” he says.
“And you were angry. You called her a liar. What else?” I say.
There’s a lot of rolling of eyes here, resolve turning to concession.
“I might have said something else.”
“What?” This is like pulling teeth.
“Maybe. . I don’t know. I might have wished her dead,” he tells us.
“I would think you might remember something like that,” I tell him.
Acosta shrugs.
“You told somebody you wished she was dead?”
“I might have said something like that. Called her some names,” he says, “and wished she were dead.”
“Terrific,” I say. “Can you remember the exact words?”
“Is that important?” he says.
“If the cops have talked to the witness,” I tell him.
He puts fingers to forehead, like the Great Karnak summoning all his powers.
“I think I might have said that death was too good for the cunt.” The Coconut’s loose translation of wishing someone dead.
“Wonderful. And this death wish. Who was it made to?” I ask.