Perjury by Stan Latreille

Author:Stan Latreille [Latreille, Stan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81548-4
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2012-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

“That pretty young thing at the front desk couldn’t take her eyes off me,” Davey said the next day. “What have you been telling her about me?”

“Absolutely nothing, which of course makes you all the more intriguing,” I replied. “After all, you are a bit of a celebrity.”

She refused to be placated. “I suppose so. But all I want is to get my daughter back and have this nightmare behind me.”

“All in good time,” I said. “But first we have the little matter of a trial. I need to talk with you again about some of the details of what happened with Joel. I have a lot of questions—things that may come up during the trial.”

She sat stiffly in a red dress that had a long pleated skirt. “What’s wrong? We’ve been over all this before. Why couldn’t we talk out at the lake?”

“Because a stuffy lawyer’s office is just what we need—stuffy referring to the office, not the lawyer. It keeps our minds on our work.”

Usually I knew how to talk to clients. I knew when to advise, when to bully, when to persuade, and when to shut up and just listen. Once a trial becomes unavoidable, the idea is to get the facts—no more slipping and sliding—and settle on a strategy. I thought of Brenda Foreman and Jennifer Calkins, and I realized how little I really knew about this woman. I had not seen her since our rainy-day encounter, but I knew she would say nothing about it.

Davey’s expression settled into one of sullen resignation. It was another first in our relationship. She was angry at me, even mistrustful. Another Davey? Or was she merely reacting to something she had spotted in me? Or was it my silence since the scene in her apartment?

I looked down at some notes I’d written on a legal pad. The yellow legal pad was a godsend at times like these. Its appearance was like the sounding of a gong, warning all present that serious business was about to commence.

“Let me start out by asking you whether anybody else knew that the specific accusations you made against Joel were false. Did you confide in anybody?”

“Who could I tell? All the people we knew were Joel’s friends first.”

“The answer is no, you told nobody?”

“Nobody.”

“How did you come to select the details of the two incidents? You testified that one involved you coming home unexpectedly from shopping and finding Joel on the bed and holding Julie. How did you come up with that one?”

“Do we have to talk about this?”

“Yes, we do.” Her eyes were welling up, and there was a catch in her voice. I was grateful that I’d chosen the office for this conference. Things were too warm and fuzzy out at the lake.

“I read it in a magazine—or perhaps it was a book. Or maybe I just made it up out of my imagination. I don’t recall.”

“Something as important as that, and you don’t remember?”

She dabbed at her eye with a Kleenex that she took from her purse.

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