“Why not?”
“It’s very unusual for a criminal defendant to testify. You have the right not to testify, and a jury isn’t allowed to draw any negative conclusions if you don’t. If you do, all kinds of havoc can break out. In your case, you have two prior convictions. The prosecutor will make a very big deal out of them if you testify, which automatically makes you look very bad to the jury. Sometimes that’s fatal.”
“Yes, but how will the jury know what happened if I-”
“The witnesses and the hard evidence have to do the job for you.”
Then Nina took him through the whole thing again.
3
NINA PARKED A BLOCK AWAY AND WALKED PAST THE FLOWERS AND art galleries of the quaint tourist mecca of Carmel to the offices of Pohlmann, Cunningham, Turk. She arrived at the white wood-frame office on the corner of Lincoln and Eighth by eleven-thirty, buoyed by her talk with Stefan Wyatt. The early morning fog had burned off and she had made good time from Salinas, consolidating her thoughts all the way.
Innocent or guilty, at least she liked the client. Some clients were so angry, so distant, or so disturbed that they were an ordeal to sit next to at all. Stefan was a cooperator. The jury wouldn’t dislike him on sight. She reminded herself to try to get some young women on it.
Walking up the white-brick stairway to the law offices, she remembered herself in her thick-soled athletic shoes bounding up these same stairs during her law clerk days. Somehow she had managed to take care of Bob as a single mom, work at the Pohlmann firm, and go to the Monterey College of Law at night. None of her subsequent incarnations, as an appellate lawyer in San Francisco and as a sole practitioner at Tahoe, had been as harried, yet she remembered those days, when she had been deeply immersed in learning new things and raising a little boy, as happy and rewarding.
Back then she had assumed that the financial need, her single life, and her direction in law would all be resolved by now. Well, marrying would be a resolution of sorts, but she had lived enough to know that a good life didn’t resolve. It offered satisfying moments, new beginnings, and more irresolution.
Nina wasn’t completely lacking in self-consciousness, but she found thinking about her own life confusing. Other people’s lives never bored her, though-their lies, their capitulations, their bad luck, their fates. Other people’s situations made her skin vibrate, her heart beat louder, her blood pump harder. She could do practical things, applying her intelligence and rationality to their lives in ways she never could for her own. She could make a difference, and what else was there to live for before you ended up moldering in a coffin, bones, like the poor man in this case?
Love? She held up her left hand and looked at the glittering diamond on her finger. It had a sharp, definite look about it.
Near the top of the stairs, hurrying too much, she paused by the window. One of the secretaries had kept a delicate flower garden going out there in the old days, and the white building that had started its life as a house had blue irises, red geraniums, and a hominess that didn’t seem present anymore in the practical juniper bushes and clumps of tall grass waving in the soft gray air.
Nodding at the receptionist, she walked down the short hall and opened the door to her new office.
Nina’s secretary from Tahoe, Sandy Whitefeather, filled the brown chair in the compact front office like a lion balancing four legs on a tiny stone. Today she wore a down vest over a black turtleneck over a long denim skirt and burgundy cowboy boots. Sandy ’s long black hair was pulled into a beaded band that fell down her back. Behind her, a mullioned picture window looked over a courtyard full of stalky weeds and wildflowers.
She hung up the phone, saying, “About time. I see you have new shoes again. You’re gonna break your neck one of these days, wearing those torture heels.”
“You have new shoes, too. Don’t tell me those narrow pointy toes are the shape of your foot. I’ve seen your feet. I bet they’re killing you.”
“Yeah, but I like what I see when I look down.”
Nina sat down and kicked off the high heels. “Okay, we’ll both get bunions. Peace pipe?”
“Hmph. The Washoe people don’t use peace pipes. Get your stereotypes straight.” She studied Nina. “New shoes,” she said, “and jewelry, too. A whole new you.”
Nina felt obscurely embarrassed, but she held out her finger for Sandy ’s scrutiny.
“Big,” Sandy said. She wasn’t looking at the ring. She was looking at Nina.
“It was his grandmother’s.”
“Tradition is good.”
“No need to fall out of your chair celebrating or anything.”
“Congratulations, of course.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s a big step.”
“Forward,” Nina said firmly.
“How did Bob take the news?”
Bob had spotted the ring the minute she picked him up from her father’s house. She tried to explain, but he put up a hand. “I know what a ring means, Mom.” His reaction had been mixed, not altogether positive, but not harsh, to her relief.
“He’ll need time to adjust to the idea,” she told Sandy, realizing she was using Paul’s words.
“So you’ll be staying here. With the golfers and the retirees.”
More assumptions. “We haven’t worked out the details.”
“Hmm.” Sandy turned back to the paperwork on her desk. “I made up the files and left a list of the D.A.’s office and other numbers on your desk. Mr. Pohlmann says the firm’s taking you to lunch. He dropped off some of his files for you.”
“Great.”
They had a month to work through everything, including the upcoming trial. Although Nina had succumbed to Klaus almost immediately, she hadn’t actually committed to Stefan Wyatt’s case until she had found out Sandy wasn’t just available, she was eager to take a break from Tahoe. Solid, matter-of-fact, and smart, Sandy was a friend too, for all her crankiness and obstinacy. With her along for the ride, Nina felt strong and supported.
After finishing up a job in Washington lobbying for more Washoe ancestral lands, Sandy had come down to Monterey County with her husband, Joseph, and established herself immediately with some old friends who ranched near Big Sur, where her son, Wish, was already staying. As she explained it, one of her daughters had shown up unexpectedly a month before at their ranch near Markleeville, kids in tow, husband glaring.
Sandy didn’t go into what had brought her daughter home, she just said the tepee up in Alpine County, actually a small horse ranch she and Joseph owned, was feeling mighty cramped these days. Joseph was recovering from surgery and needed fresh air, riding, and “no more of what that girl of ours has to give at the moment.” She had accepted Nina’s offer of a temporary position at the Pohlmann firm without bothering to ask a single question.
If Nina stayed here in Carmel with Paul, she would lose Sandy. Sandy was rooted to Tahoe deep as the white pines and ancient oaks on her property. The idea made Nina quake. She needed Sandy.
“How did it go with Wyatt this morning?” Sandy asked.
“It’s a long story.” Nina gave her an abbreviated version. “Could you get my interview notes into the computer today?”
“Sure. Guilty or not?”
“Don’t know.”
“Didn’t you form a first impression?”
“He looks harmless.”
“But then so did Jeffrey Dahmer. I heard Stefan Wyatt went to school at CSUMB for a while before he got arrested,” Sandy said. Her son, Wish, had also attended California State University at Monterey Bay that summer, picking up more credits toward a degree in criminal justice. “You know their thing, right?”
“No,” said Nina. She picked up the top file Klaus had left and scanned it.
“Holistic studies,” Sandy said, her voice passing stern judgment.
“Okay.”
“Good place for kids with bad attitudes who can’t cut it in the real world.”
“Wait a minute. Your own son goes there. Wish says he has terrific teachers.”
“He’s not doing that holistic stuff. He’s on the vocational side.”
“I think it sounds interesting. And it sure fits Wyatt’s style. He’s young, loose, in the tearing-down phase politically.”
Sandy, shifting in a borrowed chair, black eyes narrowed, expressed the mood of the displaced and dispossessed, saying, “Other people have to be practical about what they study so they can get along after college. Other people settle down, pay a mortgage, keep a business going…”
“Without gallivanting around the Monterey Peninsula, grabbing diamond rings, when they should be back practicing law at Tahoe with their long-suffering secretary. Is that what you’re saying?”
Sandy put on her poker face.
“I’m not sure I need a hard time from you this morning, Sandy.”
“You call this a hard time? Where’s the groom?”
“Paul’s due in a few minutes. I called him on my way in from Salinas and told him about my interview with the client.”
“That Dutchman’s a bad influence on you.”
“Yeah?” Nina said, putting one report aside and picking up another. “Seems like you always used to promote him as the solution to my problems.”
“Did not,” Sandy said.
“What are you working on there?”
