“I know some lawyers in Costa Rica. In San Jose there are many.” She looked at my business card. “ Coronado, where is that?”
“Down the coast, just a little south of here. It’s across the bay from San Diego.”
“Ah. And what type of legal work do you do?”
“Mostly criminal trial work.”
“Really? That must be interesting. You must be very intelligent to do that.”
“It has its moments. Sometimes it’s interesting, sometimes it’s stressful, and there are times when it can be boring.”
“So if I get in trouble, I could call you,” she said.
“Well, you have my phone number now.”
“Yes, I do.” She slipped my business card into her purse with the pen.
We finished our coffee. I had to run to catch my friends. We said good-bye. That was nearly two weeks ago.
EIGHT
This morning Katia does not look nearly as young or as innocent. The smile is gone, as is the twinkle in her eyes. But even without makeup, and missing a solid night’s sleep in the women’s lockup of the county jail for the better part of three days, she is still strikingly beautiful.
Harry Hinds, my partner, has insisted on coming along this morning, whether to confirm this fact or to save me from myself, I am not sure. But it seems that Harry now has a stake in all of this. Without realizing what they were doing, the cops have rung Harry’s bell. As a result we may be in this for the duration.
Strange as it sounds, it was the police who came knocking at our door yesterday morning, not Katia who called. Among the items the cops found in her purse when they arrested her was my business card. This piqued their curiosity. Following the murders and the suspect’s arrest, authorities wanted to know what I knew, in short, how my card had gotten into her purse before the events, if, in fact, that was the order in which things had happened.
They asked specifically whether she had ever been to my office on a legal matter regarding business. I told them no. They asked if I’d ever been to the house where she was living with Emerson Pike in Del Mar. Again I told them no. So there was no lawyer-client relationship? No. That opened the floodgates. What did we talk about? They wanted to know every detail. When I explained the quixotic manner of my meeting Katia, in the market that morning two weeks ago, and our conversation over coffee immediately afterward, they seemed to back off.
And that was the only time you met or talked with her? Yes.
Of course, by then it didn’t matter. It was too late. Someone, somewhere leaked to the media that a lawyer’s business card identifying me by name was found in the suspect’s purse. It has been all over the local news for twenty-four hours, the breathless nonstory of the lawyer who may be involved. So now Harry wants to know what the cops know. It has become a game of lawyers’ tag, and for the moment it seems that I am It.
So this morning we are busy pulling together the details, the few things that we think we know, how the police caught up with Katia in Arizona on a bus halfway to Houston, where she was headed. According to the newspapers, because the police have not officially confirmed it, they tracked Katia from a cell phone signal, a phone she had stolen from the man she was living with, her friend, the coin dealer who now is dead, along with his household maid. This is the basis for all this unpleasantness and one more reason why you might want to think twice before shopping for bananas on a Saturday morning in Del Mar.
I must admit that I never connected Katia by name with the crime until the police knocked on my office door. There is enough crime in this part of the state that one more murder, more or less, doesn’t always catch your attention, even if it’s blaring from the evening news. But after the cops left, I went diving for the papers, everything I could find in print since the night Emerson Pike was killed.
Using the public defender, Katia is to be arraigned on two counts of first-degree murder tomorrow morning. At the moment, I’m not sure that we can help her. The mountain of incriminating evidence seems almost overwhelming. Harry and I have consulted the public defender to ensure that we are not stepping on toes. We have established an attorney-client relationship for the purpose of evaluating whether we might take the case. For one of those nefarious reasons that lawyers sometimes seize upon, the public defender was quite happy to have us do this. Why? Because, if nothing else, it will keep me off the stand as a witness.
Katia’s lawyer can’t be sure what his client may have said to me the day we met or how such an innocuous and innocent episode might be dressed up or drawn out to look incriminating if I were forced onto the stand; the specter of another older man being hustled by the young, alluring suspect. The best way to inoculate Katia from this is to draw me into the case. Once I talk to her, even tangentially, as lawyer to client, my testimony is verboten. The prosecution probably couldn’t even get my business card into evidence.
Katia seems happy, even if surprised, to see me. Why she didn’t think to use my business card to call, I’m not sure. And I don’t ask.
“I guess we should start at the beginning, why you took the bus?” says Harry.
This isn’t exactly the beginning I might have started with, wondering instead how she met Emerson Pike and how their relationship developed. But I leave it to Harry for the moment.
“If you wanted to return to Costa Rica, why not fly?” says Harry. “There are direct flights to points south out of San Diego.”
“I couldn’t,” she says. “The first place Emerson would have looked for me was the airport.”
“Emerson Pike was dead,” says Harry.
“I did not know that. All I know is that he was alive when I left the house.” She looks at me on this. “You must believe me. I knew he would follow me. And the first place he would go would be the airport in San Diego. Besides, I didn’t have enough money to take a plane.”
“Let’s talk about that, the money,” says Harry. “Pike’s wallet, the one the cops found on the bed, had your fingerprints on it. Did you know that?”
She shakes her head no, and then says, “Of course. I am not surprised. I took the money from his wallet. I already told the police that. I needed the money for the, how do you say? The
“The ticket,” I say.
“For the boose.” She is talking about the bus. “It was the only way I could get away from Emerson. He wouldn’t give me money. And he wouldn’t let me go.”
Harry is standing less than two feet from her, one foot on a chair, looking down at her. This is one of his favorite postures when he’s visiting someone in jail and wants answers. “Why wouldn’t he let you go?”
“I don’t know.” She looks at him, shaking her head. “He wouldn’t tell me. I asked him, over and over again. But he refused to tell me. He said he loved me. But I know that wasn’t true.”
My partner shoots me a cynical glance. Harry is thinking, older man, younger woman, the oldest reason on earth.
Katia’s darting eyes vacuum up Harry’s thoughts. “No. Es not that,” she says. “It’s something else. It’s something to do with the pictures. I’m sure.”
“What pictures?” I ask.
She spends several minutes telling us about the photographs taken by her mother in Colombia the year before
