You Think You Know Me Pretty Well aka Mercy (10 page)

“Has that computer disrespected your family?” he asked, putting on his croakiest Brando/Don Corleone accent.

She looked round, her expression a mixture of confusion and anger, to see a puerile grin on his face.

“Ha fuckin’ ha.”

Alex walked up to see what was going on.

“There’s something strange about this computer.”

“Strange?” he echoed.

“The hard disk has been wiped.”

Alex looked at the screen. Juanita was using Norton Utilities to inspect the disk content at a raw-data and deleted-file level.

“So how come it’s still working?”

“I don’t mean they reformatted it. I mean that all the deleted files have been overwritten. Normally the deleted files remain on the hard drive until the space is needed. It just deletes the directory entry and tells the directory that the space is available. But there are programs that overwrite the deleted files completely – sometimes making several passes with the erase head just to make sure.”

“And why would anyone do that?”

“What kind of a chicken-shit question is that?” She sounded cute when she was angry. “To delete any trace of the files and stop them from being recovered!”

“That implies there was something in them worth deleting.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Alex leaned forward, peering at the screen with growing excitement.

“Making it all the more important that we recover their contents.”

“Which would be very nice, except there’s no way we can do that.”

“Maybe there is.” The phone was already in his hand by the time he said it. “Let’s call my son.”

“The one at Berkeley?”

Alex’s son David was a theoretical physicist.

“I only have one son.”

“How do you know?” she asked with a cheeky grin. Alex sensed that there was more to Juanita’s displays of impertinence than mere mockery. Melody had been just like that. It was her way of flirting with him. He wondered if it was the same with Juanita. She had certainly given him a few hints. He wondered how much of it was real and how much was just his imagination.

The lawyer in him knew that office romance was a dangerous game at the best of times – especially with a subordinate. If he did decide to go down that road, he’d have to tread carefully. But in any case it was a bit too early: the pain of losing Melody was still too raw … and today was hardly a day to be thinking about that sort of thing.

Juanita pressed the speed dial button and then handed Alex the phone.

“Hi, Dave … Yes, I am, but I need your help ... We have a computer with a hard disk that’s been wiped … No, I don’t mean reformatted, just the deleted files have been overwritten … How many passes?”

Alex looked inquiringly at Juanita. She shook her head.

“We don’t know. But what I want to know is …
it is
? Scanning tunneling…”

Juanita mouthed the word “microscope” to show that she understood.

“You mean only if she just wiped it once? Oh I see. Okay, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I’ll courier it over.”

And with that he put the phone down.

“He can recover the data,” said Juanita.

“How d’you know?”

“When I hear one side of a phone conversation, I can usually figure out the other. Read Godel, Escher, Bach.” She started walking away.

“I tried. I couldn’t get beyond the dialogue between Achilles and the Turtle.”

“Besides
-
you’re smiling.”

12:20 PDT

“Mrs. Burrow?” Nat called out nervously through the closed door of the mobile home. No answer. “Anyone home?” Still no answer.

Nat opened the door, tentatively, and gingerly stepped inside. Technically it was trespassing, but the door was unlocked and time was of the essence. He looked round nervously. The living room was a mess. Surveying the ashtrays and half-empty plates with three-day-old, dried-out food encrusted on them, the words “trailer trash” came to mind.

He was about to start looking round when he was shocked to hear the sound of a flushing cistern – and he realized that he was not alone after all. For a few seconds, he waited with some degree of trepidation, looking in the direction of the bathroom and wondering if he was going to be confronted by a Stanley Kowalski type in a wifebeater.

To his relief, the figure that emerged was female, albeit the female equivalent of Stanley Kowalski. Sour-faced and borderline angry, she was closer to her mid-century than her youth. Under her eyes, the bags were noticeable, and although she wasn’t currently smoking, she looked as if she ought to have a cheap cigarette dangling from her lips.

“Who are
you
?” she sneered.

“My name is Nathaniel Anderson.”

He held out his business card. Her eyes dropped to his outstretched hand, but she made no effort to take the proffered card, or even gave any indication that she was interested in looking at it. He put it away in his breast pocket.

“Are you Sally Burrow?”

“Who wants to know?”

He realized that she was just being melodramatic, but a little clarification was called for.

“I work for a lawyer called Alex Sedaka.”

“I don’t like lawyers,” she snarled.

“Neither do I,” he replied, trying to sound chummy. “But a man’s got to earn a living.”

Her face remained as sour as ever. He debated making a second attempt to break the ice, but rejected the idea on the grounds that the humor would probably go over her head.

“So,
are
you Sally Burrow?”

“Last time I checked,” she said.

“Mr. Sedaka – the man I work for – is representing your son.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Sedaka … Alex Sedaka.”

“No, I mean, who d’you say he’s representing?”

“Your son.”

“I don’t have no son.”

“Clayton. Your son Clayton.”

“He ain’t no son of mine!” she shouted, flopping into a chair. “Not anymore.”

Nat looked at her, trying to assess the situation, unsure of how to proceed. He decided to sit down too, taking the fact that she was seated as tacit permission to do likewise.

“I presume you disowned him after he murd— after he
killed
Dorothy Olsen.”

“You can call it murder if you like,” she said, finally taking out and lighting the cigarette that ought to have been in her mouth all along. “I believe in calling a spade a spade.”

Nat realized that Sally Burrow was a lot more astute than he had given her credit for. The fact that she had picked up on his reluctance to use the word “murder” proved that. He realized that he would have to tread carefully and not underestimate her intelligence, or at least her cunning.

“And that was when you disowned him?”

“Not immediately.”

“But that was
why
you disowned him.”

“Right.”

“When did you decide he was guilty?”

“I don’t really remember. I guess it happened … kind of gradually.”

“Well what did you think when he was arrested?”

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“Did you stand by him during the trial?”

“I didn’t
go
to the trial.”

“So you
already
thought he was guilty by then.”

“What else was I supposed to think? With her panties under the floorboards in his bedroom and her blood on them? And his jizz!”

“You don’t think it could’ve been planted?”

“Gimme a break!”

“Okay, so let’s say he’s guilty. That
still
doesn’t explain why you didn’t stand by him.”

“Why the fuck should I?”

“I mean … he
is
your son.”

“I already told you. I ain’t got no son.”

“Did you have one
before
the murder?”

Sally Burrow’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was wondering if maybe you saw the signs of the way your son was going
before
he killed Dorothy Olsen.”

“Are you tryin’ to make out that I …
knew
what he was gonna do? Like I’m some kind of a … accessory to what he done?”

“No, I’m not suggesting that you knew he was going to kill Dorothy. I was just wondering if there were any early signs of Clayton turning into the sort of person that he eventually turned into … if you see what I mean.”

“We didn’t talk much. He had
his
life and I had
mine
.”

Nat seemed to be having trouble digesting this.

“Didn’t talk?” he echoed.

“Didn’t talk,” she confirmed, drawing on her cigarette.

What he said next surprised even him.

“Has it occurred to you that if you’d given him more attention and affection he might not have become what he became?”

He didn’t know afterward what had
possessed
him to say it. But in some strange, indefinable way, he was glad that he had.

Sally Burrow looked as if she’d just been pole axed. Her lower jaw dropped open and the cigarette fell to the floor.

“You’ve got a fuckin’ nerve comin’ into my home and talking to me like that!”

“All I meant was—”

“I don’t need you preachin’ to me!
Get the fuck out of here!
”

She was on her feet now, lurching toward him, and he noticed that she was not a small woman by any stretch of the imagination. He twisted sideways like a corkscrew as he rose from the seat to avoid her menacing onslaught and sprinted the few steps to the doorway.

She was still chasing him out in the yard when he had opened up a distance of twenty yards between them. Puffing through her smoker’s lungs, to be sure, but still chasing.

He was just glad she didn’t have a gun.

12:31 PDT

The young man sat cross-legged on the floor before the shrine in his apartment in Daly City, his eyes closed. He was trying to remember Dorothy, remembering her kindness toward him even when he was at his lowest ebb. He remembered one time when she had faced particular brutality. He had watched from a safe distance but had been too frightened to say a word. Afterward he had run into her arms crying and it had been
she
who had comforted
him
. There were tears in his eyes now as he opened them.

He looked at the clock on the wall. It wouldn’t be long now. Soon he would have closure. In his pocket he had a piece of paper that was most precious to him. It was a spectator’s pass that allowed him to go to San Quentin and witness the execution.

The TV was on in the background. But the sound was turned down. He wanted to be left alone with his thoughts until it was time to go to San Quentin. But at the same time, he wanted to stay in touch, to hear about further developments on the case.

Clayton Burrow had a very savvy and tenacious lawyer, he had heard. And a smart and savvy lawyer wasn’t going to give in until the fat lady sang. He wondered how Burrow was feeling as he awaited execution. What was going through his mind? Was he afraid? Terrified? Or maybe he was just resigned to it. Maybe he just didn’t care. Just like he didn’t care about others or how much pain he had caused them.

Stop it!
He ordered himself.

But he couldn’t stop it. It had been in the news so much these last few days that it was hard to think about anything else.

On the rolling TV news, Dorothy’s face appeared for the umpteenth time. It gave way a few seconds later to that of Martine Yin, with the governor’s San Francisco office as her backdrop. Jonathan would have ignored it, but the words “breaking news follow-up” flashed up, causing him to grab for the remote control. In haste he pressed the button to turn the sound up.

“So far the governor’s office refuses to confirm even that there is an offer on the table. But we
can
confirm that Burrow’s lawyer Alex Sedaka visited Burrow in prison right after his meeting with the governor and left the prison less than half an hour later. At this time we have no information on whether Burrow has accepted the offer.”

The young man’s face was dissolving into confusion as he struggled to understand what Martine Yin was saying.

   Offer? What offer?

“Similarly, we have been waiting outside the governor’s office for any word of the outcome from this quarter. One thing we
do
know is that even if Clayton Burrow were to reveal where he buried the body, they would still have to dig it up and confirm that it was the body of Dorothy Olsen before granting him clemency, but – ”

“
No
!” the sound echoed from the young man’s mouth, partly the plaintive whine of a frustrated child, partly the angry roar of a wounded lion. Blinded by rage, he picked up the nearest object – the phone – and hurled it across the room. It landed against the wall with a smashing sound, and bits of plastic flew off in all directions.