“That the bastard is dead. It makes my job a lot easier, and Emily’s life. Not that she will see it that way, poor thing, but truth to tell she would have gone back to him eventually, and eventually he would have killed her. Much better this way.”
“Urn.” In Kate’s experience, lawyers did not speak so frankly, certainly not to a cop. “Right. You are representing her, then? May I have her address, please?”
“I am representing her, yes, and I think it would be better if I continued to do so by asking you to come here to interview her in my presence. She’s living in a shelter, and it’s better if the residents don’t feel invaded. I could bring her to you, if you’d prefer, Inspector.”
Kate reflected for a moment before deciding that if the much-abused Emily Larsen had nothing to do with her husband’s death, it would not help matters to drag her downtown, whereas if she did, keeping the first interview away from police territory would give the woman a false sense of security that might come in useful later.
“I’ll come there,” she said. “What time?”
They agreed to two o’clock at Lomax’s law offices south of Market Street. Kate took her heels off her desk, brought the paperwork for that report and a couple of others up to date, and went home for lunch, a rare occurrence.
At two o’clock, while Al Hawkin was bracing himself for the first cut of the pathologist’s knife into the body of James Larsen, Kate rang the bell at the entrance of the anonymous building. As Kate thoughtfully eyed the dents and bashes in the surface of the stout metal door, the speaker set over the bell crackled to life, and the same secretarial voice she had heard before declared, “Law offices.”
“Inspector Kate Martinelli to see Ms. Lomax.” She lifted her face to the camera lens concealed in the reaches of the entranceway, and was buzzed in.
Half a mile north of this address, law offices meant marble, polished oak, smoked mirrors, abstract art, and a size-five receptionist with a daily manicure. Here it meant industrial-quality carpeting, white walls in need of a touch-up, museum posters in drugstore frames, and a size-six-teen secretary with short, unpainted nails on her skilled hands. She also had a waist-length braid keeping her graying brown hair in order, no makeup to speak of, skin too pale to have spent time out of doors, and a large basket of toys next to her desk. The woman fixed Kate with a gaze that had seen it all.
“Have a seat,” she offered, though it sounded more like an order. “Carla will be here in a minute.”
“That’s a good security setup,” Kate commented, remaining on her feet. “Do you have a lot of problems here?” SoMa was not the most crime-free part of town by any means, and that door had been the victim of at least one determined assault.
“It’s because we have security that we haven’t had problems.”
“Angry husbands?”
“And boyfriends and fathers. They pound away until the cops get here, making fools of themselves for the camera.” She glanced at the monitors with amused but slightly bitter satisfaction, and Kate, reflecting that the odds were high the woman had once needed the services of a women’s advocate lawyer herself, moved around the desk as if the glance had been an invitation. Peering over the secretary’s shoulder, she saw the displays of four security cameras. Two showed a small parking area; as Kate watched, a light-colored, boxy Mercedes sedan at least ten years old pulled through an opening gate on one screen and parked on one of a half-dozen spaces shown on the next. From the car stepped two women, the driver sorting through her keys as she approached the building until the all-seeing secretary pressed a button and freed the door.
Kate walked up and down for a few minutes, trying to get an impression of the law offices. Casual seemed to be the unifying decorative theme, beginning with the untidy forest of objects on the receptionist’s desk (two spindly plants; a flowered frame with the picture of a young girl; a delicate terra-cotta Virgin and Child; a figurine of an Indian goddess with a black face and golden crown; a three-inch-tall carved box representing a heap of cheerfully intertwined cats; a sprig of redwood cones; and a chipped coffee mug, stuffed with a handful of pens and pencils, that proclaimed “When God created man, She was only joking”). The works of art on the walls were similarly eclectic, with museum posters (Monet and Van Gogh) adjoining framed crayon studies (stick figures and box houses) and one competent and very original tempera study of a woman and two children, done with a deft hand in pleasing tones of green and blue. In the corner were the initials P W, and Kate was just thinking that Lee would like this when Carla Lomax came into the room to shake Kate’s hand and lead her back into the building. As Kate followed, she glanced into the other rooms. There looked to be a couple of other partners in the firm, neither of them at their desks. Between two unoccupied offices was a meeting room with a large round wooden table that took up so much of the floor space, it must have been assembled in the room. On the wall a striking black and white poster caught Kate’s eye, the blown-up photograph of a woman with a swollen mouth and two black eyes, a bandage on her scalp, and a cast on one hand, gazing tiredly at the camera. Underneath her image were printed the words,
Carla Lomax stepped into the next office, sat behind her desk, and waved Kate at a chair across from her. Again Kate remained on her feet. Two could play games in the world of legal give-and-take.
“I thought we might have a word before I bring Emily in,” Lomax told her. “Just so we’re in agreement here.”
“What is there to agree about?” Kate asked, half turned away from Lomax to study an attractive arrangement of framed photographs of the City at night, gaudy North Beach, Chinatown shimmering in the rain.
“Emily Larsen has just lost her husband. She does not need to be harassed.”
Kate took a step over to the next display of photos, an assortment of scenes from foreign countries: a woman in a market, brilliant colors in her shawl and a bowler hat on her head; three thin but laughing children playing in a street with a bicycle rickshaw behind them; a woman seated at a backstrap loom, a weaving of vibrant oranges, pinks, and greens emerging from the threads.
“These are nice,” Kate commented. “Where are they from?”
“Bolivia, India, and Guatemala.”
“Did you take them?”
“Yes,” the lawyer said. “Inspector Martinelli—”
“Ms. Lomax, how much criminal law have you done since you passed your exams?”
“Not a lot.”
“Mostly family law, right?”
“I know my law,” Lomax said, offended.
“I’m sure you do. But please, rest assured that so do I, and I don’t go around screwing with family members; it jeopardizes both my job and my cases. Let’s just bring Mrs. Larsen in and let me talk with her, and then I’ll let you both be.”
As Kate had suspected, Carla Lomax was more at home with the intricacies of divorce, child custody, and restraining orders than she was with Miranda rights and criminal investigations. The lawyer hesitated, but in the end she stood up and went to fetch Emily Larsen.
Kate continued to wander around the room, moving from the photos to a display of ethnic dolls and trucks on a low shelf (the better to distract the children of clients?), an impressive bookshelf of legal and psychological tomes, and finally a glass case containing female figures from all over—a grimacing Aztec goddess giving birth to the sun, a multiple-breasted female who looked vaguely Mediterranean next to a woman in wide skirts holding a pair of snakes, the Polish Black Virgin, and the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe. Prominently displayed in front was a crude dark-skinned figure six inches tall, with many arms, bare breasts, and a protruding tongue: wild-eyed and wild-haired, the figure wore a necklace of grinning skulls and held a decapitated head in one of her hands. Kate, nonplussed, could only wonder what Carla Lomax’s troubled clients made of their lawyer’s art collection.
The door opened and Carla came in with Emily Larsen, and Kate shook her hand and introduced herself, sitting down with the two women in a group of chairs and making remarks about the weather and traffic to put Emily at ease.
In fact, though, Kate was always uncomfortable around victims of chronic spousal abuse, those walking reminders of the vulnerability of women—particularly those weighed down with children. Intellectually, professionally, she fully understood that a person’s willingness to put up with abuse had its roots deep in childhood, when a groundwork of self-contempt and a deep sense of worthlessness was laid down, feelings that made it nearly impossible to stand up to bullying. As a person, however, as a woman, Kate felt primarily frustration and
