Claim of Innocence

19

V alerie walked around her lifeless apartment. It felt that way, she supposed, because she herself had grown more and more like that, as if she were in a walking coma, getting ready for her mind to shut down. Because prison seemed real. Imminent. And the only way she could imagine surviving that was to become someone else and put away the person she was now.

She walked into the kitchen and turned on one small light. Although she had enjoyed wine before, in her other life, she had not had a glass of wine or a cocktail for months now. She had no taste for it, had little taste for anything. But now there was a pinprick of light in the flat existence in which she had been living. It was the light of possibility.

The reason for the slice of optimism was Izzy McNeil. She completely trusted the Bristols, but neither Martin nor Maggie had wanted the whole truth. She was fine not to give it. The whole truth would cause so many more problems. But still. But still, it cheered her somehow that Izzy wanted to know, wanted to understand. She had told Valerie again today—I want to believe you.

Valerie opened the door of the refrigerator, the light from inside making a bold entrance into the dimly lit kitchen. Although the sun still shone outside, it was always dark in her home these days. She had gotten used to closing all of the blinds and drapes to keep herself away from the curious eyes of her watching neighbors.

The refrigerator was old and mustard-colored. It had been here when she’d rented the West Side apartment after Brian died. Despite her hopes that she would come into some kind of salary stream, that she would find her calling and be able to replace the appliances, maybe even move back to the Gold Coast near Bridget and Amanda, such a bounty had never happened.

Her refrigerator, as well as her cupboards, was only spottily inhabited, aside from the supplies she’d bought the other night for the chocolate torta—the one she’d never made. Neither she nor Layla was particularly interested in grocery shopping lately. Or food. But she knew she should eat. She looked at the random contents of the fridge—ketchup, eggs, a slightly shriveled pear, a bottle of grapefruit juice, ground flax seed, a folded piece of foil with an old tortilla in it, half a carton of graying mushrooms, a few teaspoons of milk in the bottom of a carton, and a container of leftovers Layla must have brought home from a restaurant. She opened it—half-eaten strip steak. Where had Layla gone and ordered this? She looked at it a moment longer, then put it on the counter.

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 this 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?”

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