The Disappearance (17 page)

Luke changes the subject. He’s going to have this cop on the stand, he knows that already, and he has enough information on this part of the story for now. “You pulled him over …”

Without further prompting, Caramba gives a dry, by-the-numbers description of what went down: He pulled the car over, the driver seemed flushed, impaired, he was talking loud, the usual symptoms. Then he (Caramba) spotted the opened whiskey bottle on the floor of the car, which prompted him to search (legally) for other possible violations.

Luke listens with half an ear—he knows what the guy’s going to say, almost word for word, before he says it. A parrot on a perch.

“And that’s when I found the key ring in the back of the glove compartment,” the cop says, finishing that part of his recitation. “I remembered it because it had been described to us when we were out searching for her. Since the keys were one of the few personal items missing then,” he adds, wishing he hadn’t; he wants to give the facts and that’s all, no editorializing or embellishing.

“Uh-huh. When did you read Mr. Allison his Miranda rights?” Luke asks casually, changing directions. “Before or after you found the key ring that turned out to belong to Emma Lancaster?”

The cop blinks. “After,” he says.

“And was that before or after you field-tested him for sobriety?”

Another blinking, several fast ones, as if the blinking brings up the correct answer. “Before. I mean …” He realizes he’s been caught. He stops talking.

“Hmm.” Luke rises, stretches.

The cop stares at him impassively.

When Luke sits down again, he says, “Don’t you normally wait until
after
you’ve found out if they’re over the limit or not before you read them their rights? If they’re not over the limit you’re not going to bust them, so you don’t have to read them their rights, right?”

For the first time in the session the cop squirms in his chair, just a small movement, but enough for Luke to know that the guy is feeling uncomfortable. “Yeah, normally that’s how you’d do it.”

“So reading him his rights was about finding the key ring, rather than any DUI thing.”

Reluctantly, the cop answers. “Yes.”

“Because you recognized the seriousness of it. The potential seriousness of it.”

Again, reluctantly, “Yeah.”

Luke casually leafs through the file. “I think that’s all I need, Officer,” he says. He stands and offers the man his hand. The policeman, rising on his own feet, takes it with dubious hesitation.

“Oh, one last thing,” Luke remembers. “When
did
you test Mr. Allison for whether or not he was over the limit? Did you field-test him out there on the street, or did you wait until you got back to the station?”

“I didn’t test him in the field,” the arresting officer, a career foot-soldier who will never rise higher than his present station, says as flatly as he can. But presented with the opportunity to boast a little, he can’t help but add, “At that point I had bigger problems to deal with.”

Okay, so the cop was lying. That it was a lie of omission rather than commission makes it less of a lie, but in the black-and-white-morality sense it’s still a lie, because it isn’t the full truth. The cop didn’t inform Allison, when he read him his Miranda rights, that he was a possible suspect in an unsolved murder.

The first chink in the armor. Only a technicality, one that no judge, certainly no judge sitting on the bench in this county, will listen to. But it’s a beginning, a possible handhold.

The sheriff’s office is reluctant to hand over the videotape of Allison’s interrogation. But they have to, so he gets his hands on it and watches it at home with Riva.

It’s nighttime. They’re sprawled on the floor of their sparsely furnished living room in the rental house, watching the tape on the VCR and eating take-out Chinese.

“They were playing fast and loose with the rules, Riva. They didn’t tell him he was under suspicion for Emma Lancaster’s murder. He thought all he was sweating was a DUI, which is only a misdemeanor. They don’t normally book someone on that, unless he’s falling-down drunk, which Allison clearly wasn’t.”

“Can you use that?” she asks.

“Probably not, although I’ll raise it.” He remotes the tape off. “It’s too nebulous, and they did read him his rights. It’s SOP cop stuff. I could only use it if there was other malfeasance on top of it, and I doubt there was.”

She maneuvers some noodles with her chopsticks. “You used to do that stuff, didn’t you? When you were running the show.”

He nods. “Like I said, it’s SOP. You have to get the confession, you don’t want to scare the pigeon off. It’s easier now than it used to be. The courts’ve given the prosecution much more leeway in interpreting that stuff.”

“So how does it feel?” She pours him more chardonnay. She’s wearing shorts and one of his T-shirts. Looking up at her long legs from his supine position on the floor, he feels a growing horniness.

“Being on the other side?” He quaffs some wine. “Mildly weird, but it’s not that important. Sooner or later you have to get down to guilt or innocence, and all the ‘side’ stuff gets sifted out. All this jury swaying and jury nullification stuff you read about, it rarely happens. It won’t in this case,” he predicts, “because there aren’t any unique circumstances. No racial issues, no money issues.”

“But it’s so inflammatory. All this stuff feeds the fire, doesn’t it?” she asks.

“Of course. Goes with the territory.”

He follows her into the kitchen. She rinses their plates in the sink. Handing him a towel for drying, she looks at him closely. “Luke—do you think he’s guilty?”

“The evidence points to it.”

“But what do you think?” she persists.

He puts the dried plates in the cabinet. “He’s my client. The least I can do for him at this point is be open-minded.”

“It sounds to me like you do,” she counters, trying to get him to commit. “Think he’s guilty.”

They go out onto the porch with their glasses of wine. It’s a balmy night, they’re comfortable sitting outside. In the low distance the lights of the city and the harbor sparkle and flicker.

“From up here it feels like we’re home,” she says. “Especially when it’s dark out.”

“This is my home,” he reminds her.

“Used to be,” she reminds him.

“Used to be,” he agrees. Reverting to the other train of thought she raised, he says, “If it was a kidnapping, why wasn’t there a struggle? I keep coming back to that.”

“Maybe she was still asleep.”

“Yeah. It’s logical, but it doesn’t feel right. I’ve got to pin that down more.”

Riva says what she’s thinking, what he’s been thinking. “Or she knew him.”

“That feels more right.”

“She knew Joe Allison, didn’t she?”

“Oh, yeah.” That is what’s most upsetting to him. “But if it was him, what in the world would that say about them? What kind of relationship does that say they had?” He runs a finger around the rim of his wine glass. “God forbid, if there was something going on between them, was it even a kidnapping at all?” Continuing that train of thought, he adds, “But if there was something going on between them, why would he kill her?”

Lisa Jaffe, dressed in the outfit she wore to school—holed-at-the-knees baggy overalls over a Wet Seal T-shirt and sockless black Converse All-Stars—sits cheek by jowl with Susan, her mother, on the canvas-slipcovered couch in their small living room, tightly gripping her mother’s hand for support. Luke and Riva sit across from them, a small Mexican-tiled coffee table from Pier One separating the two groups. Luke can sense her nervousness. He knows she’s been seeing a psychologist since the murder, but wonders if it’s done much good.

The house is not impressive, nor is the street on which they live. A small clapboard house in need of paint in a neighborhood of like houses. The people in this neighborhood are working-class, a lot different from the rich folks in Montecito like the Lancasters.

Luke has brought Riva with him to soften the impact. Observing the witness’s mother sitting next to her anxious daughter, the woman’s mouth set in a tight line, he knows that having her accompany him was a smart move.

He takes the file containing Lisa’s statement from his briefcase and opens it, laying it on the coffee table in front of him. “This won’t take long,” he assures mother and daughter. “We appreciate your seeing us.”

Susan gives him a tight nod. Lisa stares down at the open file as if the flat papers inside it might come alive and attack her.

“We have a few details to clarify,” Riva says by way of opening the questioning. Luke has introduced her as his “colleague,” leaving any specific designation deliberately vague. He’s already prepped her on what he is hoping to find out. Her asking the questions will make it easier for Lisa to speak freely.

“Lisa has to leave for ballet rehearsal in half an hour,” Susan says. Meaning: don’t drag this out.

“That’s fine,” Riva says in a soft, calming voice. She picks up Lisa’s statement. “Initially you weren’t sure if this had happened or if you were dreaming it? Is that correct?”

Lisa looks at her mother, who nods. “Yes,” the petite girl says in a small voice. “But it wasn’t. I said that because I had been very tired. We’d been up late and I got woke up, so for a minute I didn’t realize where I was, since I wasn’t in my own house,” she goes on, rambling from nervousness.

She looks closer to twelve or thirteen than fifteen, Luke thinks, observing her. He wonders if she’s even started menstruating yet. Certainly anything having to do with sex would be foreign and scary to her, even more so a year ago.

“You’re positive, then, that what you saw was real, and not a dream,” Riva says.

“Yes. It was real.”

“The man—it was a man?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Had her in his arms.”

“Yes.”

“Actually, what you told the police was, someone who must have been a man had something in his arms that must have been Emma, is that right?”

The girl, twitching like a nervous rabbit, glances at her mother.

“Go ahead,” Susan Jaffe tells her daughter, her irritation at this uninvited intrusion into their lives clear and unambiguous. Luke, watching the interaction, knows she won’t consent to having her daughter interviewed again; they won’t have another chance to question her until she’s actually on the stand at the trial.

He’s okay with that. There’s only one important detail he wants to nail down.

“Yes,” Lisa says timorously, answering Riva’s question about what she had told the police.

“But at the time you actually witnessed this—at about three or four o’clock in the morning, after having been abruptly awakened from a deep sleep—you didn’t know it was Emma wrapped up in that blanket, is that right?” Riva asks, keeping her voice low and soothing.

“Yes,” the girl admits.

“You never actually saw Emma’s face?”

“No.”

“Or the man who took her.”

Lisa draws breath. “No,” she admits. “I didn’t see him.”

“He had a hat on that covered most of his face,” Riva reads from the file. “Do you remember telling the police that, Lisa?”

“Yes,” the girl answers quietly.

“Let me see if there’s anything else,” Riva says, looking to Luke for prompting. He makes a twisting motion with his hand. “Oh, yes,” Riva says. “You went to Emma’s house from downtown in a taxicab, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Who let you into the house?” Riva asks. “Was it Mrs. Lancaster, or was it someone else? Or was the door unlocked?”

The girl blinks. Thinking about that, she scrunches her eyebrows in a frown, then says slowly, “I don’t … Emma unlocked the door, I think. Nobody let us in,” she says with more certainty.

“So either the door was unlocked, or she used her house key,” Riva continues the thought.

“I guess.”

Riva glances at Luke. He nods. “I think that’s all we need for now,” she says, closing the folder and handing it to Luke. Bending closer to Lisa, she says, “That wasn’t too bad, I hope.”

“No, it wasn’t too bad,” Lisa admits. She’s relaxing her vigilance, now that the questioning’s over.

“May I ask one question?” Luke says. He’s on his feet, stuffing the file into his thickly filled briefcase.

“What?” the girl says, freezing up immediately.

“This man who was carrying this figure in the blanket. Did he have anything else in his hands, like some clothes, shoes, a purse. Anything like that?”

Lisa thinks for a moment, closing her eyes and scrunching up her forehead again. “No,” she says, opening her eyes and looking at him. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

Sitting outside the Jaffe house in the old truck, Luke ponders what Lisa Jaffe has just told him. “If Emma Lancaster unlocked the door that night, that means she had her keys with her. And then she’s carried away. So how does the key ring get out of the house and into Joe Allison’s car a year later?”

“Unless the door was unlocked and she didn’t use her keys,” Riva responds.

“Okay, that’s one possibility, although in her statement to the cops, Glenna Lancaster went to pains to talk about how they were security-conscious.” Thinking, he goes on, “Or another possibility, Emma had a duplicate set of keys. Not far-fetched. And she did know Allison, so she could have lost her keys in his car some earlier time, told her mother she lost them and didn’t remember where, and got a new set.”

“Except her mother made a big point of telling the police that
those
keys were missing,” Riva reminds him. “Specifically. They were the only items she could definitely remember as missing, because of the sentimental value.”

“So unless Emma was asleep when her abductor snatched her, she went without a struggle,” he recaps. “And her missing keys might not have been missing when they were supposed to be missing.”

“Which takes us back to her knowing who did it,” Riva reiterates. “And going with him willingly.”

“Man, I hope to God there’s no evidence that points to Joe Allison having some kind of secret relationship with that girl,” Luke says apprehensively. His finely tuned lawyer’s antennae are quivering, feeling something percolating out in the corner of the ether where justice is sometimes served, sometimes subverted, but always jacked around.
Why the fuck did you take this dumb case? You come back for a sure thing, not a thousand-to-one shot.
“Because that would be the coffin nail from hell.”