Secrets and Lies Read online

  He looked over the contract thoroughly and signed it. “So you’ll start getting to work immediately?”

  I nodded my head, and said nothing. I was nonplussed about the fact that he was so willing to pay such a higher dollar amount for my services. He didn’t question it. He didn’t even blink. I was charging him as much as a white shoe firm would charge, and I was far from being a white shoe lawyer. Granted, any amount of money he was going to pay me was going to be a drop in the bucket for him, but still.

  I crossed my arms in front of me, and wondered what his game was. “As I told you before, I’m going to find out anything that you’re not telling me. So if there’s something I need to know, about why do you want me so badly to represent you, then you need to come clean about it right now.”

  He simply put his checkbook back in his jacket pocket and stood up. “I can certainly come to visit you anytime you need me to speak with you. As you might imagine, as a condition of my bail, I am not to leave the country. In fact, I am not to leave the jurisdiction. So, I have assigned my international travel to my deputy. That means that I will be at your disposal. I will be in my office, as I plan on keeping a full work schedule. But, I will make any time that you need me to make to speak with you.”

  “Okay. I appreciate that.”

  He tapped his fingers on my desk again. “Is there anything more that you need from me right now?”

  “At the moment, no. Although I’m sure that once I start getting into the investigation of this case, I’m going to have to speak with you.” I had a feeling that when I spoke with her parents and her friends, I was going to get a very different picture then what Silas was telling me as far as how their relationship went.

  He stood up. “Very well then,” he said. He gave me his business card. “I know that I filled out a client intake sheet, however, I still want you to have this. I need for you to call me anytime of the day or night if you need to speak with me. I have nothing to hide. I hope that you know that.”

  As he walked away, I did wonder about that. Briefly. I wondered if it was true that he had nothing to hide. My gut was telling me that he had a lot to hide.

  And my gut was never wrong.

  Chapter 3

  That night, I decided to have a small dinner party. I invited both Harper and Tammy over to share a meal with me and the kids. After dinner, I was going to speak with both of them about my becoming a partner. That was the reason why I wanted Tammy around as well. Obviously, since she was an equal partner with Harper, she was going to have to be okay with bringing me on as another partner. I also wanted to speak with both of them about the situation with Silas. I knew that Tammy probably knew his story. In fact, she had come into my office briefly and asked me about it after he left.

  I was going to pick both of their brains about it, and ask them what they thought.

  I got home and saw my kids waiting there for me, with Gretchen, the neighborhood girl who came over and watched them after school. Things were still tense between me and the kids, for different reasons, but they were gradually getting better. Amelia and I had to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t her biological father, so things had been weird between us for the past several months. As for Nate, he was gradually starting to hate me less each day. After the divorce, he refused, for months, to speak to me. For some odd reason, he adored his mother, even though she was a no-account witch who abandoned the family when Amelia was possibly dying of cancer, taking up with another man and pretending that the kids didn’t exist.

  Then, after all was said and done, she revealed to Amelia that her biological father was somebody else - my own half-brother, Jake Brillis, as it turned out. She was apparently screwing him while married to me, which was fine, once I thought about it - after all, her affair produced Amelia, and, since I couldn’t picture my life without my young daughter, I really had to mentally tip my hat to both Sarah and her lover. What pissed me off was that Sarah told Amelia about the paternity issue, all because she wanted money - Sarah and her current lover, Baron Wicker, hatched up a scheme to falsify DNA evidence that showed that Baron was Amelia’s dad. Apparently, Baron, who was a rich bastard, wanted to be an even richer bastard, and he needed an heir before he could collect on a coming inheritance from his terminally-ill grandmother. I managed to catch them in the act, with the help of Nick, my best friend and investigator, who uncovered the scheme and I threatened Sarah with criminal prosecution and a lawsuit, which made her back down.

  “Hey, dad,” Amelia said when I came through the door. She motioned over to Nate, who looked visibly shaken. “Nate’s kinda freaked out right now. Guess I don’t blame him, after what happened at his school today.”

  Nate was 10 years old and in the fifth grade, while Amelia was 8 and in the third grade. They both were in a private school, although they went to separate ones. “What happened at his school?” I asked Amelia.

  She said nothing, but just gestured over to him. “Ask him,” she said. “Not my story to tell.”

  I looked over at my sullen son, who just shrugged his shoulders. “Not a big deal. Some clown brought a gun into school. Guess he was mad at one of his teachers.”

  I sighed. I hated that the kids had to worry about such things as weapons being brought into school. I never did when I was their age. The Columbine massacre happened when I was 16 and in the 11th Grade. Before that, school shootings were almost unheard of. Since then, they were becoming routine. Too routine for my money. “So, what happened? They lock everything down?”

  “Sure,” Nate said nonchalantly. “They locked everything up, then the cops came and took him away. Just another day at my richie-rich private school, dad. Turns out kids who got money are just as screwed up as the ones who don’t.”

  I never imagined that there would come a day when I would be concerned that one or both of my kids weren’t safe at their schools, but that day had finally come. Not that I could do anything about it. I could have them home-schooled if I was that worried about the two of them getting shot at their school, but I knew that, in the end, the odds were astronomically against something like that happening, so I was going to stay with the status quo. “You need to talk about that, buddy?” I asked him. “It had to be scary for you to see that kind of thing.”

  He shook his head. “No, dad, I don’t. I’m okay. I don’t think that kid was actually going to shoot somebody. I heard that the gun wasn’t even loaded.” He shrugged again. “I guess his parents are splitting up and he’s having a hard time with it. They brought in a school counselor and everything to come and talk to us if we were scared and stuff. I wasn’t scared, so I didn’t talk to the counselor. I mean, dad, you see guys with guns all the time. If you’re not scared of guys with guns, I’m not scared, either.”

  I cleared my throat. I was still trying to get under the layers with Nate - the defensive layers. He was a mysterious kid in a lot of ways. He never could confess to how he was really feeling about any given situation, it seemed. Just like when he clammed up when Sarah and I got divorced, instead of screaming or crying or even just talking about his feelings, he dealt with all problems in that same way - shrugging his shoulders and changing the subject. Acting like nothing mattered. Of course, things did matter to him, but it was hard getting him to admit to that.

  “Nate,” I said, “don’t snow me about this. A kid brought a gun into your school. That’s serious business. I’m going to have to talk to your school administrators about what kind of safety measures they’re going to take to make sure this doesn’t happen again, that goes without saying, but, Nate, you have to talk to me about how you really feel.” I was his age once, of course, and if some goofball brought a gun into school, I would have been freaked out, to say the least. Of course, when I was his age, I was dealing with my own problems - a mother with a revolving door of men, and then having a stepfather who physically abused me on a regular basis, which led me to killing him in his sleep when I was just 15. I certainly didn’t have the privileged l
ife that Nate had, that was for sure, yet, even at my hard-scrabble school, nobody actually brought a gun, let alone brandished it.

  “Dad, really, it’s no big deal,” he said. “I don’t know why you have to make it seem like it’s some huge prob. It’s not. The kid got taken away by the cops, the other kids all started saying that he’s not coming back, and now I guess we’re going to get metal detectors and stuff and we’re all going to have to have clear backpacks. I also heard that we’re going to get some kind of rent-a-cop to watch over us, but I think that’s just stupid.” He shook his head. “Why don’t they just wrap us all in bubble wrap and call it a day?”

  If only wrapping my kids in bubble wrap would protect them…“Okay. Well, if you need somebody to talk to, I’m the only game in town, kiddo. In the meantime, I got Harper and Tammy coming over for dinner, and I need your guys’ help in getting dinner ready.”

  We went into the kitchen. The kids got busy in chopping onions and peppers for our chili, while I opened up cans of tomatoes. After Amelia was done with her pepper, I put her to work in making the cornbread mix, which was something that she loved doing. I secretly thought that Amelia was destined to become a chef one day, because she really had quite an affinity for cooking. At the age of 8, she didn’t just have scrambled eggs in her repertoire, but also chicken alfredo pasta, lasagna and chicken pot pie. She loved watching cooking shows on TV, and there was more than one occasion when she looked up the recipes she saw the celebrity chef making and tried to make it herself.

  As I browned the meat and threw the onions, peppers and tomatoes into the skillet, I talked to the kids. “Are you sure that you don’t mind Harper and Tammy coming over tonight?” I asked both of the kids.

  “Dad,” Amelia said. “Of course I want them to come over. Don’t be silly. I mean, I am freaked out, but I’ll be okay. I promise I’ll be okay.” She motioned to Nate. “I think that he’s okay with it, too.”

  “Are you, kiddo?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “Sure, dad,” he said.

  The kids and I made the chili, and then I heard the doorbell ring. I saw both Tammy and Harper on the other side of the door. I opened up, they came on in. “Look at us,” Tammy said. “We just happened to arrive at the exact same time.”

  “That is unusual.” After all, Harper was usually running late. But, apparently not this evening. It was right at 7 o’clock, which was the time I asked them to come on over.

  We had dinner, and I sent the kids into the room to go do homework and do whatever they needed to do once their homework was finished. That was their usual routine. The kids were allowed their private time, to do whatever they wanted to do, as long as they got their homework done. I then checked to make sure that their homework was finished before they were able to play video games or read or watch television or whatever it is that kids do these days. I really didn’t need to check on their homework – both kids were honor roll students. Yet, I knew how I was when I was growing up. I was always trying to get out of doing homework. I figured that that was an age-old problem, really.

  Is that what kids always do? Try to get one over on their parents?

  The kids were upstairs, and Tammy and Harper I went out into the sunroom to talk about the possibility of my becoming a partner. I had brought in a lot of business in the time that I had been with them, and they considered me to be a valuable member of our team. There was a time when I was afraid that I was going to go to prison for the rest of my life, as I had been accused of killing my father. Thank God that time had passed.

  “Okay,” Harper began. “We need to go over the terms for your partnership.”

  “Yeah, we’ll talk about that,” Tammy said to Harper and then she turned to me. “I know that’s what you wanted to talk about. But, I was curious about Silas Porter. I read about him in the paper. I read about what he did. Is he going to be your client?”

  I took a deep breath. I had signed Silas on, against my own better judgment, but I still wasn’t entirely clear that I wanted to enter an appearance on his behalf. There was a part of me that still wanted to back out of the contract and pay whatever kind of damages I would have to pay to get out of it. I got into that contract in haste, really, when I thought about it. What was I doing, getting involved with the guy who possibly murdered his wife in cold blood, and probably was an abusive person as well? He told me, of course, that he wasn’t, but I just knew that when I spoke with the people who were the friends and family of Ava, I was going get a different story, one that was not so sugarcoated and pretty as what he gave me. That was usually the case. In this case, I was sure of it. This guy seemed like somebody who was hiding a lot.

  “Yeah. He’s my client as of now. Why do you ask that question?”

  Tammy shrugged. “I just didn’t think that was the kind of thing that you would want to get involved with. I mean, let’s face facts. I’ve been paying attention to this case, and it seems like your client has a lot of problems. Not that that’s a big deal. Of course not. You guys have dealt with some pretty hardened criminals in your careers. I just didn’t think that a guy like Silas was somebody who you would want to take on as a client.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well I know that you’re very sensitive about people who abuse women. Because of what happened to your mother. I know that you get especially squeamish when the guy has money and power. So seems like it’s a perfect storm with this guy as far as the things that you try to avoid. I’m just surprised that you would take these issues on.”

  “Well –” I opened my mouth but I really didn’t know what to say. Granted, Silas insisted to me that his relationship with Ava was not abusive. But it made me suspicious that she had those bruises on her body.

  “Well, what?” Harper asked me. “I agree with Tammy. I think you’re playing with fire here. The media has already found out that you’re the person who’s going to represent him, and they’ve already started calling the office. Pearl’s been talking to them, but you’re going to have a lot of messages that you’re going to have to return in the morning. You’re going to have to respond to these media inquiries. Silas is the kind of person who’s going to want you to.”

  Ordinarily, I tried never to speak about my clients to anybody. It was always my policy never to comment on an open investigation or an open case. That was always the best way to do it. But, at the same time, I knew that Silas was going to want to get his side of the story out. His publicist was going to give his story, but I had a feeling that he wanted me to go ahead and also put out a statement. And, at the moment, I had no idea about` the kind of statement that I was going to put out. I still didn’t know what was going on in this case. I had my suspicions, but I wanted to get more into it before I talked to anybody about it, and that included the media.

  “How is it that you know so much about Silas? How do you know that he’s going to be the kind of person who’s going to want me to speak with the media about his case?”

  “Because it’s obvious. The stories coming out about him are horrible. You have to read them. I know that you probably read at least one of the stories, but you should read some of the other ones. These stories are really portraying him as being a piece of work. And did you know that he has been in a mental hospital?”

  I narrowed my eyes. For some odd reason, the fact that Silas had been in a mental hospital concerned me. I guess it was because he had such a demeanor when I met him. A cold, calculating demeanor. It was as if I was in the midst of a serial killer. That was the kind of feeling I got. So, to find out that he had some kind of mental issues, did not sit well with me. To say the very least. “Do you know why he was in the mental hospital?”

  Tammy shrugged. “It’s just what I’ve been hearing. It has not been reported yet in the paper, or in the media in general, because that’s the kind of thing that you have to find out for sure or else somebody can sue you for libel. And, from my media contacts, they tell me that they have not yet been able to verify that fact
. I’ve heard it off the record.”

  “Why are you so interested in this case already? I mean, Silas just came into my office today. You had time to do all this research already?”

  Tammy looked embarrassed. A little ashamed. “Well, no. Actually, Pearl told me earlier on, actually yesterday, that Silas had called for you. You were in court, and then you went home. So you didn’t even know about it. But when I found out that he had called to make an appointment with you, I decided to start looking into it. I’m sorry, I’m just looking out for you. I know how you get. And I know what you’ve been through. Plus, I remembered reading the paper about this case, and I wanted to find out about him before you decided to take him on as a client. I didn’t know that he would come back into the office so soon. I wanted to talk to you about it before you were going to sign a contract for representation with him. I guess I didn’t get to you soon enough, and I regret that. Very sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay,” I assured her. “Thank you for looking out for me.” I was going to have to get information about where it was that he allegedly went into the mental hospital. “Are you sure that it was a mental hospital, however? Maybe it was a rehab facility or something of the sort. A lot of guys in his position, high stress positions, end up having some kind of drug problem because they have to work so much. Using cocaine and meth and speed is not necessarily unheard of in high-powered professions. Maybe that’s all it was.” Then again, I knew that Harper was in the hospital several years back. She was having a manic episode, and she didn’t even know at that time that she was bipolar. She just figured that she was depressed, because she’d never before had a manic episode. I knew that being in a mental hospital does not necessarily mean that one was crazy, but, rather, sometimes it just meant that meds needed to be adjusted. That was how it was in Harper’s case.