Vanishing Acts Read online

  "Judge, that's completely prejudicial," I say. "We're talking about a scuffle years ago, one which is completely irrelevant to the charge at hand."

  "Irrelevant?" Emma stares at me. "Did you happen to notice whom your client was beating up at the time?" She hands me a copy of the old assault charge--the same one I skimmed when I got it during discovery, figuring it had nothing to do with this case. My eyes hone in on the victim's name: Victor Vasquez.

  Six months before Andrew absconded with his daughter, and three months before his divorce, he beat up the man who would later marry his ex-wife.

  Which, actually, does go toward motive ... namely revenge, if your wife is screwing around with a guy before you're even out the door.

  The judge gathers the papers on his desk into their file. "I'm going to allow it," he says. "Is there anything else, Counselor?"

  Emma nods. "Your Honor, I think it's clear to all of us that Mr. Talcott hasn't noticed up a formal necessity defense. That leads me to believe that he's going to run this trial as an all-out slander of Elise Vasquez."

  It's exactly what I'm planning to do.

  "I'd like to say on the record that I truly hope this doesn't turn into a smear campaign of the victim, just because counsel doesn't have anything redeeming to say about his own client."

  The judge fixes his gaze on me. "Mr. Talcott, I don't know if they allow character assassination in the courtrooms of New Hampshire, but you can be assured that we certainly don't allow it here in Arizona."

  "Regular assassination, though, would be a different story," I murmur under my breath.

  "What was that?" the judge asks.

  "Nothing, Your Honor." Andrew is guilty as hell of kidnapping, but there must be ways around that. It's the way defense law works: You always plead not guilty, when what you really mean is guilty, but with good reason. Then you talk to your client and he gives you details from his sorry life that will win the sympathy of the jury.

  Assuming, that is, that those details from your client's sorry life don't thwart you at every turn. I think back to what the nursery school teacher said about Andrew threatening to take his daughter; to Emma's smug expression when she handed me Andrew's old assault charge. What else hasn't he told me that might screw this case up even more?

  "You've got thirty days to pull a rabbit out of a hat, Counselor," Judge Noble says. "Why are you still standing here?"

  When Andrew walks into our private conference room at the jail, I glance up. "Let's add this to the list of things you ought to mention to your attorney, who is trying his best to get you acquitted: that your prior conviction for a bar fight just happened to involve your wife's future husband."

  He glances up, surprised. "I thought you knew. It was right there on the record at the arraignment."

  "You feel like enlightening me any further?"

  He stares at me for a long moment. "I saw him," he confesses, his voice cracking. "I watched him touching her."

  "Elise?"

  Slowly, Andrew nods.

  "How did you find out there was something going on?"

  "Delia had drawn a crayon picture for me on a piece of scrap paper. I was hanging it up in my office at the pharmacy when I happened to notice there was writing on the back. I thought it might be something important, so I turned it over ... it was a letter Elise had been writing to someone named Victor. I was still married to her. I loved her." He swallows. "When I asked Dee where she got the paper from, she said the drawer next to Mommy's bed. And when I asked her if she knew anyone named Victor, she said he was the man who came over to take a nap with Mommy."

  Andrew gets up and walks toward the door, with its tiny streaked window. "She was in the house. She was only a baby." He stands with his hands on his hips. "I came home early from work one day, on purpose, and caught them together."

  "And you messed him up so bad he needed sixty-five stitches," I say. "Emma Wasserstein is going to use that whole episode to explain why you turned around and kidnapped your daughter six months later. She's going to say it was a premeditated act of payback."

  "Maybe it was," Andrew murmurs.

  "Do not say that on the stand, for God's sake."

  He rounds on me. "Then you make up the story, Eric. Give me a goddamned script and I'll say whatever you want."

  It would be enough, I realize, for any defense attorney: a client willing to do whatever I say. But it's different this time, because no matter what facade I build over the truth, we'll both know there's something hiding underneath. Andrew doesn't want to tell me more, and, suddenly, I don't want to hear it. So I pick three words from the quicksand between us. "Andrew," I say heavily, "I quit."

  Fitz is trying to make fire. He's put his glasses down on the dusty ground, and has positioned them in direct line with the sun, to see if they'll ignite the crumpled ball of paper underneath the rims. "What are you doing?" I ask, unraveling my tie as I approach the trailer.

  "Exploring pyromania," he says.

  "Why?"

  "Because I can." He squints up at the sun, then moves the glasses a fraction to the left.

  "I told Andrew I quit," I announce.

  Fitz rocks back on his heels. "Why'd you do that?"

  Glancing down at his combustion experiment, I say, "Because I can."

  "No you can't," he argues. "You can't do that to Delia."

  "I don't think it's healthy to have a spouse who looks at you and thinks, 'Oh, right, he's the guy who got my father locked away for ten years.'"

  "Don't you think it's going to hurt her more when she finds this out?"

  "I don't know, Fitz," I say pointedly, thinking that this is the pot calling the kettle black. "Maybe she'll find out what you're doing first."

  "Find out what?" Delia says, coming out of the trailer. She looks from me to Fitz. "What are you doing?"

  "Trying to talk your fiance out of being an asshole."

  I scowl at him. "Just mind your own business, Fitz."

  "Aren't you going to tell her?" he challenges.

  "Sure," I say. "Fitz is writing about the trial for his paper." Immediately I feel like a jerk.

  Delia steps back. "Really?" she says, wounded.

  Fitz is red-faced, furious. "Why don't you ask Eric what he did today?"

  I've had it. First the hearing in chambers, then the argument with Andrew, and now this. I tackle Fitz to the ground, knocking his glasses to the side as we scuffle on the dirt. Fitz has gotten stronger since the last time we've done this, which must have been ages ago. He grinds my face into the pebbles, his hand locked on the back of my neck. With a jab of my elbow in his gut, I manage to get the upper hand, and then my cell phone begins to ring.

  It reminds me that, in spite of how I'm acting, I'm not some stupid adolescent anymore.

  I frown at the unfamiliar number. "Talcott," I answer.

  "This is Emma Wasserstein. I wanted to let you know that I'll be adding a witness to my list. The man's name is Rubio Greengate. He's the guy who sold your client two identities back in 1977."

  I walk around to the back of the trailer, so that Delia won't hear. "You can't spring this on me now," I say, incredulous. "I'll object when you file the motion."

  "I'm not springing anything on you. You've got two weeks. I'll have the police reports of the interview we've done with him on your desk by tomorrow morning."

  This means that the prosecution has established a witness to tie Andrew to the abduction--and for reasons I've never understood, juries hang on the words of witnesses, even when their accounts aren't accurate. I open my mouth to tell Emma that I could actually care less, that I'm excusing myself from this case starting immediately, but instead I only hang up the phone and walk back to where Delia is now standing alone.

  She looks like she has been stung, like she is still smarting. And why shouldn't she? It's not every day you find out that someone you trust has been lying behind your back; for Delia, this is becoming commonplace. "I told Fitz to go to hell," she says quietly. "I said