Matter of Trust Read online

  ‘You’re blaming the girl for her own death?’ David was stunned, the woman was beyond arrogant.

  ‘The doctors couldn’t understand why her condition did not improve. They’d stemmed the bleeding in her brain, but they said it appeared as if she had no will to recover. No guts, for Christ’s sake. The girl’s mother was a greedy lush. She saw us coming and asked for $50,000 cash – threatened us with going to the media when we’d managed to keep the whole situation under wraps.’

  ‘But she wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on. Chris was never charged.’

  Gloria glanced toward the frosted glass door behind them before lowering her voice. ‘He was charged with aggravated assault after one of the Rutgers students came forward to make a statement. Chris’s father, through his extensive contacts, managed to get it reduced to simple assault.’

  David marvelled at the power of a family such as the Kincaids, given the major difference between the charges of aggravated and simple assault was the seriousness of injury or extent of bodily harm. If Chris’s actions had left Lorraine in a comatose state, then the first charge was more than warranted.

  ‘You have to understand where Chris was at in his life,’ Gloria continued. ‘He had just been accepted into Princeton, his father was ill, we knew his days were numbered. Chris’s future was our only concern – and any link to this girl and her injuries was . . . well, unthinkable. But then the girl up and died on us,’ she said, now resting on the clerk’s desk behind her. ‘And the mother started making noises – loud enough for the Prosecutor’s Office to come calling on Chris once again. They said that now that the girl had passed, a new charge would be considered – one of reckless manslaughter for God’s sake. They wanted to re-open the case, and re-interview the witnesses.’

  Gloria shook her head in frustration, her perfectly styled ash-blonde hair shifting before coming neatly to rest once again.

  ‘By this stage, Daniel was bedridden, the cancer finally taking control. So I did the only thing I could do: I retraced our steps back to the hospital, spoke to the girl’s physician and after some lengthy discussions, succeeded in getting him to reassess the official cause of death. The accident had caused her brain to haemorrhage, this was indisputable, but the cause of the bleeding was reconsidered. There was a possibility she had died from an aneurism, you see. That she was a walking time bomb just ready to explode.’

  ‘You convinced the doctor to lie about his original diagnosis?’

  ‘I convinced the hospital that a one million dollar donation to their much-needed trauma wing wasn’t something to be laughed at. You have to remember that the possibility the girl might have had an aneurism was not outside the realms of possibility. True, the EPO then argued it was most likely Chris’s actions had triggered the aneurism, but from what the witnesses in that horrible bar had said already, the girl was shoved this way and that several times by numerous combatants during the fight. One witness even stated that Chris’s girlfriend had pulled the girl’s hair, which meant that technically, if I’d pursued it, she might have been the one found guilty.’

  David could see the regret in Gloria’s eyes – that she had been in a position to point the finger at Marilyn but hadn’t had the opportunity to do so.

  ‘So the charge of involuntary manslaughter went away?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, along with the assault charge which was moot given the girl was deceased. We even managed to get the original charge expunged from Chris’s record.’

  ‘So effectively Lorraine’s death was a better result for Chris compared to the original assault charge.’

  ‘Effectively.’

  David was disgusted. ‘And Chris walked,’ he said knowing Gloria would hear the disdain in his voice.

  ‘Yes,’ she bit. ‘As did you, Mike, Rebecca and Chris’s girlfriend.’ She made the point with determination, and in the very least David found himself giving her credit for never allowing morality to protect her own son from himself.

  ‘But it didn’t work,’ said David.

  ‘Oh, yes it did,’ she argued.

  ‘No, Gloria, you may have stopped the battle but you didn’t end the war. Marshall is a man on a mission, he must have toiled through twenty-year-old expungements to discover what he did. Next he’ll wheel out Lorraine’s mother, and the doctor you bribed.’

  ‘The doctor is dead. He died a year or so after the new trauma centre was completed, they named it for him. That’s how I know.’

  ‘And Lorraine’s mom?’

  ‘I have no idea. She looked like she had one foot in the grave over two decades ago. My guess is she followed her daughter – and if not, I am sure she will be more than conducive to . . .’ Gloria stopped herself there, but David knew exactly what she had been about to say.

  ‘Your chequebook is not the answer, Gloria,’ he said, pointing at the booklet in her manicured right hand.

  ‘Really?’ She managed a smile. ‘It’s worked wonders before.’

  ‘Not today.’

  And despite herself, Gloria nodded.

  They stood there in silence for a while, David eventually moving beside her to lean on the clerk’s desk as well.

  ‘If you lose this, I will ruin you,’ Gloria said eventually.

  ‘If I lose, you won’t have to,’ he replied.

  ‘You still care for him, after all these years.’

  ‘He’s my friend,’ he said.

  ‘Despite his ridiculous obsession with not letting go of the past.’

  ‘No,’ replied David. ‘Because of it.’

  39

  New Jersey Port Authority Police Department Sergeant John Cusack had been dirty, and his son Will knew it. Mind you, you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that the various shady-looking characters who used to arrive at their back door late on a Sunday evening with fags in their mouths and fat yellow envelopes in their hands were up to no good. And it didn’t take a university degree to establish that the envelopes got fatter as the years went by – right up until the weeks before 9/11, when his dad got a tip-off that he was being investigated by IAB, after which the shady characters vanished and the envelopes disappeared.

  Will’s mother was asleep, no doubt aided by the painkillers she was addicted to. She used to be a pretty Portuguese girl with chestnut hair and a figure that turned men’s heads and now she was an undernourished mess who spent her days scamming prescriptions off the local dealers and her nights dulling the pain of a life gone to ruin with whatever pharmaceutical mix she had managed to collect that day.

  Will had made certain discoveries about the importance of family after his father had died and all of them went to highlight the extent of his mother’s failings. He would like to think that he loved her, but truth be told, he was jack of her. He had spent a great deal of his youth defending her against the curled fists of his pathetic excuse for a father and she’d repaid him with nothing but a blank stare and an empty bank account. In the end, Will figured there was only so much you could do for a woman who swapped her mother’s engagement ring for a pre-opened packet of Vicodin.

  It was late. Will’s bedroom was dark. He had decided, having sensed Jack needed some space, not to stay at the Delgados’ tonight. The Delgado place had been his regular refuge over the past ten years – providing him with more of a home than this place.

  His apartment smelt of cabbage – not from tonight’s dinner as his mom had stopped cooking for him years ago, but from decades of the goddamned borscht that his Polish father had insisted his mother make. The cabbage and beet soup had been a staple in their tiny two-bedroom home as long as Will could remember, and now the stink of it was imprinted in his nostrils, feeding his resentment, poisoning his lungs.

  Will’s problem, as far as he could tell, was that he did not know if he had a problem or not. He’d created one, but then it went away, thanks to some quick thinking and the decision to involve Connor.

  He hadn’t intended for things to go as far as they had – but he was h
is father’s son after all, and his father had spent his entire life overstepping the mark – in his career, in his physical abuse of his wife, and in his stupid fucking decision to drag his corrupt cop ass up the stairs of the north tower until the walls began to shake.

  Now Will had overstepped the mark too – no doubt about that.

  My biggest problem, he thought, as he reclined on his brown-sheeted double bed, the pillow itchy with sediment from the construction work next door, is not knowing how much they know.

  After the evidence revealed at this morning’s show-stopping court appearance, it appeared as though Chris Kincaid was screwed, which he deserved to be, given it was his fucking selfishness that had started this whole thing in the first place. But then there was the unknown quantity of what any new discovery might prove. What if Connor was right when he suggested the whore’s body might have acted as an incubator for clues Will had assumed had been washed away in the tide? What if there were other small details they failed to erase in their rush? If Kincaid walked, there could be a problem – the police would continue to look for the real villain and not stop until they found him.

  And then there was the issue of the money. All this trouble and Will was not one single cent ahead – which had been his sole motivation in the first place. The whore had done something with the $100,000 – he just didn’t know what!

  Then Will felt an idea brewing in the far recesses of his brain.

  He closed his eyes and willed it to come.

  It usually did, if he identified its source and chased it down and yanked it from the darkness of his subconscious and into the light.

  It had something to do with the money – or Will’s lack of it.

  And then it hit him, with a clarity so sharp he could almost see the answer written in bright neon letters on his far bedroom wall. He was looking at this the wrong way. There was a way to salvage this thing and secure the money for its original intended purpose after all. Kincaid wasn’t the problem, he was the goddamned fucking solution! Will had already decided to tell one lie about their whereabouts on the night in question – and the first lie would conveniently lay the foundations for the second. It was almost too good to be true. He’d watched enough Law & Order to know that it was up to the prosecution – not the defence – to establish the burden of proof. He also knew that cases were lost on the details – a lack of evidence here, a hole in the picture there. And so what if he could fill that hole – or at the very least suggest that he was willing to?

  The senator had deep pockets – well, obviously – and Will was due for some serious compensation. Will had spent half of his life watching Chris Kincaid present a facade of humanitarianism, but recent events had confirmed what Will had always suspected – that when it came down to it, Chris Kincaid was simply looking out for himself.

  So he would begin by keeping his ear to the ground, by sticking close to the Kincaid household and establishing just how dire the senator’s situation was turning out to be. Life was about loyalty after all, and if the senator’s lack of it helped Will in his determination to uphold it, then the man could reap what he’d fucking sowed.

  40

  The clock hit 9 am and the chimes rang out slowly. There were nine chimes – each playing its own part in some three-quarter-complete melody which, David gathered, finally got its full run at twelve.

  He was in the Kincaid living room. Rebecca sat across from him, her knees pressed so tightly together that blood had abandoned them. Connor sat at the far end of the sofa to her right, and across the room sat one of his seemingly ever-present friends – the tall, dark-haired boy who had been introduced as Will Cusack.

  The morning had been chaos – largely due to the fact that Sean had dropped his three kids at their grandmother’s. Patty Cavanaugh had offered to drive the kids to school this week while Sean’s wife Teresa was visiting her own mom in Vermont.

  Sean carried on about being late for work, but as soon as his mom and the kids were gone, he’d spent a good ten minutes berating David for standing up for a proven goddamned murderer and kowtowing to a woman who had obviously used her extensive influence to cover the whole thing up.

  ‘Chris never told me,’ said Rebecca, bringing David back to the present. ‘About Lorraine’s passing, I mean.’

  ‘I understand,’ said David. ‘But I don’t want you to worry about it, Rebecca. I intend to ask for a Sands Hearing given the prior charge Marshall is referring to was officially expunged.’ In the state of New Jersey, if the prosecution intends to use a prior charge or conviction against the defendant at the trial, and there is a question as to whether the charge or conviction is admissible into evidence, a Sands Hearing – named for the 1978 case of State versus Sands – is held so that the judge might consider the defence counsel’s argument to make the defendant’s priors inadmissible.

  ‘But what good will that do?’

  David was taken aback slightly by this new voice in the mix – the voice that came from the other side of the room, an air of authority in its timbre.

  ‘The story is all over the papers, Mr Cavanaugh,’ continued the boy named Will. ‘So this Lorraine’s death is public record, whether we like it or not.’

  We.

  ‘That’s right,’ said David, his eyes flicking from Will back to Rebecca. ‘But we are a long way from empanelling a jury and it’s possible we’ll find people who did not read the media coverage of yesterday’s arraignment.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Will. ‘In Australia?’

  But David chose to ignore him, largely because the kid – no matter how well-intentioned – was starting to piss him off.

  David spent much of the next hour verifying Chris’s version of events with Rebecca. He started with her and Connor’s whereabouts on the Saturday night in question – Connor confirming his mom had gotten home from the movies at around 9.15 pm after which she watched some television in her bedroom and went to bed. Rebecca repeated that Connor had been busy completing an economics assignment.

  ‘As for the later part of the evening,’ chimed in Will, his eyes darting toward Rebecca. ‘Jack and I . . . well, we sort of interrupted Connor at about eleven.’ The kid turned to Rebecca. ‘I’m sorry Mrs K – but as it turned out, Connor needed a fair bit of help with his assignment so Jack gave him a hand while I went downstairs and watched a couple of DVDs. By the time they were done, it was after two, so we had a . . .’ the boy hesitated, ‘. . . we shared a few beers and then Jack and I went home to crash.’

  ‘It’s alright, Will,’ said Rebecca. ‘It was kind of Jack to help out. Connor works so hard,’ she reached out to take her son’s hand. ‘You could have told me your friends came over.’

  ‘I would have,’ replied Connor. ‘But it’s just that – with everything going on, I didn’t think to . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ she interrupted, squeezing his hand. ‘I understand.’

  David wished for the millionth time that Chris hadn’t locked that goddamned study door – for then he would have had several witnesses to his client’s presence at home.

  Rebecca was clearly desperate to back her husband a hundred per cent. She even seemed disappointed when David assured her that Chris had been completely honest with him, explaining that Rebecca had come home from the movies and gone straight to bed.

  ‘I know Chris is doing the right thing by being so truthful,’ said Rebecca. ‘But . . . I cannot see . . . what harm it would do . . . if I said that I woke later, and came downstairs and knocked on the study door to check if he was . . .’

  ‘No, Rebecca. I know you want to help Chris out, but—’

  ‘What if we came downstairs and saw him?’ interrupted Connor then. ‘Yeah,’ his eyes darted toward Will. ‘Don’t you remember? We came down, and looked in on him, and he was—’

  ‘Chris told me he locked the study door, Connor,’ said David. ‘He said it was a habit, a way of stopping your sisters from interrupting him when he was . . .’

  ‘Okay, time out h
ere.’ It was Will again – making an oversized ‘T’ with his broad, olive-skinned hands. ‘I mean seriously, Mr Cavanaugh, we’re all on the same team here, right? And we all know the senator is innocent. So what’s it going to hurt to bend the truth just a little – for the sake of justice, that is?’ The boy smiled.

  ‘In my experience, Will,’ said David, finally turning in his seat to acknowledge the kid, ‘no matter how confident you are in a lie, it still is what it is – and it will always come back to bite you.’

  The boy met his eye, saying nothing until, ‘Of course. You’re the lawyer, David.’ He used David’s first name with ease. ‘Whatever you say.’

  And David, trying to contain his exasperation, turned his attention back to Rebecca. ‘Do you have any explanation as to how Marilyn’s sandal ended up in your car?’

  ‘Of course I do. Someone is trying to frame Chris.’

  ‘And how did they get into your car?’

  ‘Sometimes, if my hands are full, I forget to lock it,’ she said, her eyes darting every which way. ‘Why just the other day, after I allowed Connor to drive me to the market . . . he’s on his provisional licence and . . . remember, honey?’ She turned to her son once again. ‘Our arms were full of groceries and . . . I left it unlocked all night before I realised that . . .’

  David hated to do it, but he knew he had to stop her there. ‘Chris told me he was the last person to drive your car, Rebecca. He drove it up the end of the street because you were re-paving your drive.’

  ‘Yes . . . but I . . .’ Rebecca’s nod turned into a shake. Her breathing quickened as her cheeks began to flush. ‘The thing is,’ she looked up to meet David’s eye, ‘what if someone knew about Chris and Marilyn?’ Her eyes darted to her son. ‘I mean, over the years, Chris wasn’t exactly . . . discreet.’

  Despite the sorrow in her voice, David was almost relieved that she had said it, even though he could see that she understood exactly what she was admitting – the fact that she had known about Marilyn all these years and, by failing to object, had basically condoned their affair.