Query Letter / Missing Evidence

Dear Mr Kirshbaum,

I am writing to inquire if you would be interested in reading a 107,000 word thriller I have written called MISSING EVIDENCE

Set in California, it is about a man on Death Row, who is offered a last-minute reprieve by a lame duck state governor on condition that he reveals where he buried the victim. However, he insists he is innocent and was framed by the "dead" girl herself. In a race against time, his lawyer struggles to unravel the mystery. The book explores the themes of rape, human sexuality, vengeance and repentance in a fast-paced legal thriller and courtroom drama in which nothing is as it seems.

To place the book in the current market context, I would say: think Harlan Coben, with a touch of John Grisham. Like Coben's books, it is written in short chapters, with almost every chapter ending on a cliff-hanger or surprise. The hero – Alex Sedaka – will be a recurring character in my thrillers, although I am also planning some stand-alone thrillers.

I am a published author of thrillers (four titles by Hodder Headline in the late nineties: A FOOL FOR A CLIENT, THE OTHER VICTIM, TARNISHED HEROES, RECKLESS JUSTIVE). But for the last ten years I have limited my writing to my spare time, while I concentrated on my business: importing industrial parts from the Czech Republic. Faced with stiff competition from China, I have since sold out my interests and returned full-time to my first love: creative writing.

I look forward to hearing from you in due course.

Best regards

David Kessler

-----------------------------------

9:30 Pacific Daylight Time (14th August 2007)

It’s hard to sit still when your client is scheduled to die in 15 hours.

Alex Sedaka felt gripped by that all too familiar urge to stand and pace up and down like a caged lion. But he knew he couldn’t do so. It would be undignified – and hardly befitting the governor’s office. So instead, he sat there tensely in the brown leather-upholstered mahogany armchair, as his client’s fate hung in the balance.

“I know he had a fair trial sir. That’s why I can’t get the Courts to reconsider the case. But justice isn’t a game. It’s a search for the truth – at least it should be.”

Alex felt the gaze of suspicious eyes upon him, his shoulders hunched against the strain of the task that awaited him. Since hitting the big Five O, he had become somewhat self-conscious about his appearance, despite the fact that tennis and rock climbing had kept him lean and fit, as well as somewhat tanned. But it was not the ravages of time that had aged him: it was his work. Three decades of professional cynicism, defending scum and lowlifes, had worn away the youthful charm from the face that Melanie had fallen in love with – or given it character, as she liked to say. Only this very morning, he had stared at his wedding picture – with a mixture of joy and pain – and been surprised at how much he had changed.

But right now he was self-conscious not about his looks but rather about what he was going to say. He had held the freedom of other men in his hands on numerous occasions. But this was the first time he had been entrusted with another man’s life.

As if on cue, the governor’s voice came back at him with quiet cynicism.

“It’s not my duty to second guess the Courts now is it?”

At the back of Alex’s mind a question was nagging away at him. Do I plead for justice or mercy? Do I place the emphasis on the lingering doubts or argue about the ethics of “a life for a life?” And he had to think on his feet.

“No sir, of course it’s not your duty to second guess the courts. But sometimes an unusual case can slip through the system. And you have the power to make a difference. The courts are bound by a rigid code of rules. But sometimes the rule book goes out the window. Every case is different and this case is a classic example. I mean the whole trial took place in atmosphere of anger and vengeance. All those comparisons with Carrie—”

“Carrie?”

“The book by Stephen King… about the girl with psychic powers who was bullied in high school.”

“Oh, right,” the governor replied smiling. “I saw the movie.”

Alex squirmed.

“Well anyway… The press kept making comparisons. They just didn’t let up.”

The governor scratched his head, looking puzzled. He had rejected Alex’s written request for clemency a few days ago, but agreed to this eleventh hour face-to-face meeting at his San Francisco office, chosen by mutual agreement over LA, San Diego, Fresno and Riverside, because of its proximity to San Quentin.

“I don’t mean to sound like I’m making fun of you – ‘cause I ain’t – but you’re contradicting yourself now. You said before, that Burrow got a fair trial.”

“Yes sir, in the courtroom. But what about the media circus beforehand? It poisoned the atmosphere. By the time the trial opened, people had already made up their minds. Folks were baying for blood. But vengeance isn’t the same as justice.”

He had used the term “folks” deliberately, hoping that it would click with the governor’s populist vocabulary.

“Are we talking justice for the murderer here or justice for the victim?”

Back at the office, over the past few days, Alex had practiced pitching various arguments, with Juanita and Nat at the plate, striking the kind of counter-arguments that he would inevitably face. But the more he had practiced, the more banal it all sounded There was nothing more to add to the fossilized debate. All he could offer was a mind-numbing replay.

However, he had a few things going for him. Perhaps the strongest of these was that the incumbent governor – Charles Dusenbury – was himself an opponent of the death penalty. Not many politicians would stick their necks out by going on record with such a politically unpopular sentiment. “Chuck” Dusenbury was one of the few. Even with public opinion divided on capital punishment, supporters of the death penalty were more likely to be one-issue voters on the subject.

But this didn’t matter to Dusenbury. He was a lame duck, serving out the closing months of his term of office. His public position was that he had no plans to extend his political career at either the state or federal level and wanted to retire to a lakeside log cabin and spend his golden years playing golf and catching fish. This might have been good ol’ hometown politicking. Some people – “the media cynics” Dusenbury called them – suspected that he still harboured aspirations to catch bigger fish than you can find in a lake. You could never tell with Dusenbury.

Alex took a deep breath and tried a different line of attack.

“Okay, there’s something else that I’d urge you to consider: there’s still reasonable doubt.”

“You mean the fact that they never found the body?”

“Exactly.”

“So why didn’t you argue lack of Corpus Delecti before the courts?”

The governor was teasing him – and his smile said it all.

“Corpus Delecti means the ‘body of the crime’ sir, not the ‘body of the victim.’ You know that.”

“Of course I know it,” the governor snapped. “So why are you feeding me this line of shit?”

Alex recoiled from the anger. But he gathered his wits and recovered his nerve quickly.

“Because even if there’s Corpus Delecti in the formal sense, it’s still possible that the alleged victim is alive. Can you send a man to the death chamber with these lingering doubts still hovering over the case?”

“Well let’s see now. They found breast tissue from the victim in a plastic bag at the back of the freezer at Clayton Burrow’s home. They found the victim's blood-stained, semen-stained panties, hidden beneath the floorboards in Clayton’s bedroom. They also found a bloodstained knife with a perfect set of fingerprints in the same place. They used DNA to establish that the blood belonged to Dorothy Hafaman and the semen came from Burrow. I don’t know what you call that, but I call it Corpus Delecti!”

“Don’t you think it was just a little bit too convenient? The cops finding all that under his bed after an anonymous tip off?”

“You think they planted it? How would they get such evidence in the first place?”

“I don’t know. From the body.”

“Which they never found!”

“But why would he keep all that stuff?”

“’Cause he’s a sex killer and he wanted to keep a trophy – that’s why! Like countless sex killers before and since!”

“But would he be stupid enough to keep it under the floorboards in his own room?”

“Sure he would! He’s a peanut-brained redneck!”

Alex shifted uncomfortably. He was flogging a dead horse. Time for another quick shift in his arguments.

“Well what about her trust fund? Eighty six thousand dollars that she just liquidated a few days before she vanished?”

“The defence already tried that smokescreen at the trial. It was her money. She’d just turned eighteen and she wanted to get her hands on it.”

“And what about all that jewellery she bought with it?”

“What of it?”

“Well why would she suddenly do something crazy like that?”

“How the heck would I know? Maybe she wanted to make an impression at the prom!”

“Then how come they never found the jewellery afterwards?”

“Maybe Burrow stole it! When he killed her!”

“Then why didn’t they find any of it on him? Or in his house?”

“Maybe he sold it. He had sixteen months between when she disappeared and when they arrested him.”

“So where’s the money? He didn’t exactly lead a lavish lifestyle?”

“Or maybe he lost the jewels! How the heck should I know? The point is they found incriminating evidence on him and he had no explanation for it. It was an open and shut case.”

Alex Sedaka let the air out of his lungs. This was going nowhere.

He had only recently learned these details. He had not in fact had anything to do with the original trial. Burrow had been represented by the proverbial overworked public defender. After the guilty verdict, Burrow’s cause had been taken up by a liberal-leaning law-firm, which tried to base its appeal mainly on allegations of incompetent representation by defence counsel. When these efforts failed – and with the execution date looming ever nearer – they hinted to Burrow, in no uncertain terms, that he might like to consider hiring new counsel. They had no desire to be associated with a failed attempt to save a murderer from execution, hence their eleventh hour retreat from the battlefield.

The upshot of all this was that Alex had been called in six weeks ago to try and save Clayton Burrow from death by lethal injection.

“He'll see you now,” a hard-edged female voice cut through Alex’s imaginings.

Alex had been so wrapped up in his mental dress rehearsal of his pleadings, that he hadn't even heard her enter the room. He looked up to see the same lean, prim and spinsterly woman who had politely told him to wait here a few minutes ago. He hoped to God that he hadn’t been talking out loud while alone in the room. That would have been mortifying!

She led him down the corridor, turning back to give him a disapproving stare through her horn-rimmed spectacles when he stopped for a moment before a Perspex-fronted painting to pat down into place his grey-tinged, black hair. Alex sensed that she was the kind of woman who didn't suffer fools gladly.

When they arrived at the meeting room, the spinsterly woman opened the door, holding it for him to enter. He looked at her expectantly, but she made it clear by her body language that she had no intention of entering the room herself. As he stepped into the plush, mahogany-panelled room, the governor – a smiling, hulking figure, part-fat, part muscle – rose from a chair by a conference table to greet him.

It was at this moment that Alex was struck by the first of many surprises that were to confront him over the next few hours. It was not the governor’s casual attire that surprised him: it was the other figure in the room. For on another chair by the coffee table sat a lean, short, frail, middle-aged woman with grey hair.

"Alex Sedaka," Chuck Dusenbury’s voice boomed out. It was a politician's tone – that sort of “I'm a man-of-the-people” twang that Alex associated more with the Mid-West or Rocky Mountains than either Coast. Dusenbury followed through with a firm handshake. Alex was grateful that it wasn't a bear-like hug.

However, instead of meeting the governor's eyes as their hands gripped, Alex looked past the big man at the frail but familiar-looking woman beyond. She looked about sixty, but Alex sensed that she was somewhat younger, as if tragedy or illness had added years to her appearance.

Alex was mystified by her presence here right now. It wasn't merely the fact that this was supposed to be a private meeting between himself and the governor that left him so surprised to see her. It was the fact that he knew only too well who she was.

This sad-eyed lady, who sat there meeting his eyes, was the mother of the very girl that his client had been found guilty of murdering.

 

9:38 PDT

Inside the blue Lincoln, the small man was sitting tensely. He knew that waiting was an inherently tense activity. Inactivity breeds a kind of stress that the most vigorous of purposeful, action can never match. But there was nothing he could do about it. Waiting was part of the job.

The car was parked and the engine was off. But the key remained in the ignition, as if inactivity might give way to dynamism at any moment.

He touched the Bluetooth earpiece in his right ear, nervously. There was nothing particularly conspicuous about him. You wouldn’t pay attention to a 27-year-old blue-eyed brown haired man in a dark blue suit nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the Midway Café a few yards ahead. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t wearing a suit: his jacket was off, his blue tie loosened and the collar button of the white shirt opened.

From his attire and demeanour, he could almost have been an off-duty G-man. But his modest height and slight build detracted from that, giving him an innocuous aura. If he had been a G-man, he would have been a pen-pushing bean-counter not a field agent. There was no way you could have felt threatened or intimidated by him, even though his close-cropped hair hinted – misleadingly – at a military background.

Poised well above the horizon, the sun’s warm glow was filtered by a thin veil of cloud. To the man in the car it had all the appearance of a giant wound in the sky, with blood still oozing through the bandage – yet not like a new wound, more like an old one that refuses to heal.

He lifted his coffee cup out of the holder and took a single sip. Then he put the cup back in the holder and looked around. Golden Gate Avenue looked normal, neither calm nor exceptionally busy. But waiting here and marking time was frustrating.

He stared at the lacquered, grainy wood of the dashboard, admiring its elegance. It was a trivial thought – pondering the aesthetics of the interior design of a car – but it helped to stave off the boredom… for a couple of minutes at least.

The day was warm – not hot, just warm, hence his decision to take the jacket off. He was one of those people who couldn't stand heat or warmth. He tended to sweat in any sort of cumbersome clothing.

Finally the Bluetooth earpiece crackled to life.

“You know Mrs Hafaman, I presume.”

“We've seen each other briefly,” Alex’s embarrassed voice came through the earpiece. “But we've never actually been introduced.”

9:40 PDT

Alex walked over awkwardly to the chair where Mrs. Hafaman was sitting. He held his hand out towards her not expecting her to rise. She took it limply and he made sure to avoid the firm handshake that he usually gave, realizing that it would not be appropriate in this case.

A polite “How do you do,” was all the lawyer could muster, not quite sure of what else to say.

What do you say? Do you belatedly express condolences for her bereavement? Apologize for the fact that you’re representing the man convicted of murdering her daughter? Or keep your own counsel and remain silent?

For a few seconds he hovered, unsure of what to do next. The normal procedure is for the lawyer for the condemned man to meet the governor either alone or more usually with one of the governor’s staff present. But the sight of Mrs. Hafaman in this room had thrown the entire game plan out the window.

“Well, sit down, sit down,” said the governor amiably, pointing to a chair.

Alex looked round in the direction where the governor was pointing and shuffled awkwardly towards the vacant armchair. He sat down and looked straight at the governor – anything to avoid meeting Mrs. Hafaman’s unforgiving eyes. Dusenbury spoke again.

“I’ve been following the Burrow case closely. I was most impressed by your work.”

“I’ve hardly done anything on it really. Most of the work was already done. I only came in on it six weeks ago.”

Dusenbury, Alex remembered, was a lawyer by training, and by all accounts a wily old bastard.

“Well all I can say is that you’ve been pretty busy in those six weeks,” said Dusenbury. “If the press reports are anything to go by.”

“Mr. Governor—

“Chuck,” the governor interrupted. “Everyone calls me Chuck.”

“Sir…” he couldn’t bring himself to address this man as Chuck. “I know this is going to sound rather rude, but I was expecting this to be a meeting in which I could plead the case for clemency for my client. This isn’t usually the way it’s done.”

Alex gave Mrs. Hafaman a quick glance to make sure that she hadn’t taken offence at his remark. Her eyes remained neutral, but there was the merest hint of a nervous smile, as if she were reaching out to him in a way that he couldn’t understand.

“I know, son, I know,” the governor responded. “But this is an unusual case, ain’t it?”

Alex couldn’t argue with that.

“I’ll put it to you real simple,” said the governor. “The reason Mrs. Hafaman is here is because she’s asked me to offer your client clemency.”

9:45 PDT

"There are things I have done in my life that I’m not proud of. There were things I shouldn’t have done. I was a product of my upbringing. I wasn’t always taught right from wrong. And I was taught to hate people for things they had no control over or for things that I thought were bad because that’s the way I was brought up.

"But whatever wrongs I am guilty of, murder is not one of them. I may have been a bully in my youth, but I was never a murderer. Dorothy Hafaman suffered at the hands of many people, myself included. But I did not kill her."

Clayton Burrow stopped writing and put the pen down. His hand was aching, as writer’s cramp set in. He opened and closed the hand several times to alleviate the cramp. But it was nothing compared to the pain inside: pain… fear… guilt? He didn’t really know. He just had this constant urge to cry. He wouldn’t do so of course – at least not now. Crying was unmanly, and with a prison guard stationed outside his cell 24 hours a day he wasn’t going to let the bastards see him broken. But at night, when the lights were dimmed (they never switched them off altogether on Death Row) he would bury his face in his pillow and give in to the weakness that he managed to hide from others in the light of day.

He looked down at the letter and read the words. At the time he had written, it felt like the right thing to say and the right time to say it. But re-reading his words now, how pathetic it all sounded. This was to be his final letter, to be read out before his execution. Or was it? Maybe it was to be his final plea for clemency to the state governor. Maybe it was to be his letter to Mrs. Hafaman if his request for clemency was granted. He wasn’t really sure. Or his apology. Or his denial.

Was it meant to be a letter of appeasement or a letter of defiance. What did he want to write? He didn’t even know that. All he knew was that he was feeling bitter and angry… and afraid… and

…alone.

That was the worst part. In all his twenty seven – nearly twenty eight – years on this earth, he had always been one to surround himself with friends. Or perhaps “cronies” was a better word. He liked to surround himself with people who cheered him on and told him was an okay guy. Never a great athlete, he was nonetheless a good one, with a muscular build, defined rather than developed. He was also blessed with a smooth, “golden boy” handsome face that belied his rather spiteful and malicious nature. And he had enough puerile wit and energetic sporting process to be popular with the girls and the guys alike. He was always on the right side in the high school clique. He was always with the majority in any lynch-mob situation. He was always in with the in-crowd rather than the geek or freak on the butt end of the bullying – be it verbal or physical.

That meant that he always had friends as well as girlfriends. He was very rarely alone. And that meant a lot to him. It meant more than he ever realized, because he was actually quite afraid of being alone. But he never knew this until he found himself in a situation in which he was unable to avoid it. Throughout his happy, time-wasting, fun-loving years at high school, he had never even had to think about it. Because he was never alone, he never knew how badly it would affect him when he was. Yes there were brief moments of solitude. But their brevity was such that he never really had to think about their implications.

Looking back on it now, he probably had an inbuilt, subconscious, defence mechanism against solitude. Whenever he was alone he would rush to find human company. He was always the first to stride up to a friend or a group and stick his face into the conversation. He was always the one to approach the new kid in the class and size them up as friend or foe: friend to be used as a sounding board, foe to be bullied or at least harassed. He never walked to a class alone, always making sure that he walked with others in a group.

Even in his own home he avoided solitude. He was an only child, but he always had friends over for sleepovers. More often than that, he slept over at friend’s places. He preferred that because he was embarrassed by his mother. (He didn’t know who his father was – neither did his mother.)

So now, he had to dwell in solitude for the first time in his life. That meant that he had to confront his fears. And this was a young man who had never known fear before. He was brave in school. Chiefly because he was big enough to win fights against most of those he chose to pick fights with, and popular enough to avoid getting into fights that he knew he would lose.

But his fear of solitude – the fear that had always been there but that he had concealed from himself for so long – was now confronting him like an inner demon who would let him have no peace.

His mother didn’t visit at all. She had written him out of her life. And his old school friends – the ones whose lives he had brightened up with his antics – seemed to have no desire to share a moment’s company with their fallen idol.

But it wasn’t solitude as such that he feared. Solitude merely opened the door to his own personal Room 101 – that secret, terrifying inner chamber where ones worst fears become a reality. The thing about solitude was that it forced him to engage in introspection. And it was introspection that he feared the most. Human company had merely been a way to stave off the need to look inside himself at the miserable squalor of his own soul. But stripped of that shield, introspection was all he had. Now at last, in the deafening silence of solitude and living under the shadow of death, he had to take a look at himself for what he really was.

And he didn’t like what he saw.

He saw a man who had wasted every opportunity that had confronted him. He saw a man who had been needlessly cruel towards the weak. He saw a man who had achieved popularity with the mob at the expense of the frail and the vulnerable.

But most of all he saw a man who had no chance to redeem himself and little idea of how to do so even if the chance arose.

He knew that Dorothy Hafaman must also have had inner demons, probably far worse than his. But he had just trampled all over her, and her brother. And for what? For some cheap puerile thrills that meant nothing to him now!

He wished he could have his life over again. He wished he could have those moments back so that he could make wiser – and kinder – decisions. But God grants no second chances… if there is a God.

He looked down at the letter and realized how little it really said. How little of the truth. How little of what he really wanted to say.

Seized by anger, he picked up the letter and ripped it to shreds.

Through the bars, the cell guard watched with an implacably neutral look on his face. He met Burrow’s dark, brooding eyes, but said nothing.

9:47 PDT

Alex sat there in stunned silence. Whatever he had expected, it had not been this. Clemency? For his client? Before he had even put his well-rehearsed arguments? And the mother of the victim had specifically requested it.

Then reality kicked in.

“She’s asked me to offer your client clemency.”

The words had been chosen very carefully.

“When you say ‘asked you’,” he said cautiously, “does that mean you haven’t decided yet?”

“You know my views on the death penalty.”

“Yes sir, I do. And I’ve always respected your courage in taking that position.”

He regretted saying this as soon as the words were out of his mouth. It sounded awfully sycophantic, and the governor was too shrewd a politician not to see through it.

“And you also know that I’m pretty much my own man, especially now that I’m quitting politics.”

Alex nodded. Like many others, he wasn’t quite sure if he believed this, but now was hardly the time to give voice to his scepticism.

“Nevertheless, it would be inappropriate for me to set myself up against the will of the legislature and the courts.”

Alex came close to panic at this.

“But you said—”

“Unless… there was some compelling reason. You see son, even though I have the luxury of being able to ignore public opinion, I believe that I have a duty at least to respect it. Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson ‘a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them.’ The people who elected me may not agree with my decision. But I owe it to them at least to explain it to them. History will judge me harshly if I fail in my duty to put my reasons on record – and those reasons had better be good.”

Alex took a deep breath and regained his composure, trying to “read” the governor. He wasn’t sure if the governor was really thinking about his place in history. But now was not the time to get diverted down a blind alley of speculation over the governor’s motives. Dusenbury was throwing him a lifeline – or at least waving it in his face. That was all that mattered.

“So you need reasons,” Alex edged forward hesitantly. “And as yet you haven’t got them.”

“That’s right.”

“And you want me to supply them.”

“No, I want your client to supply them.”

Alex was beginning to understand.

“Is that why you said ‘offer’ my client clemency.. rather than ‘give’?”

Dusenbury smiled.

“You picked up on that real quick. That’s just what it is son: an offer.”

“So presumably,” Alex pressed on, “there’s a quid pro quo.”

 

9:50 PDT (17:50 British Summer Time)

The clinic was quiet in the late afternoon. But the spacious association room, with its well-scrubbed pale blue walls and clean grey leather furniture, was sufficiently sound-proofed and isolated from the wards to have the television on. They had it on all day and all night. The nurses on night duty especially used to take short coffee breaks there, flopping down on the armchairs and watching the late night TV. They preferred the all night news nations to the late night quizzes, which were little more than premium phone line rip-offs.

In practice they had a choice of four: Sky and BBC from Britain or CNN or Fox from the US. In practice most of the nurses preferred the US news stations. They were bombarded with British news all the time and as it was rolling news and nothing much happened at night, it was more interesting to watch the news from the US.

Apart from anything else it gave them the feeling that they were actually in a foreign country. There were sometimes really interesting local stories. Not wars or the economy or international affairs, but scandals involving basketball players or juicy murders like the man who murdered his pregnant wife or the even more lurid case of the woman who tricked a pregnant woman to win her trust, lured her back to her house, murdered her and then conducted amateur surgery to get the woman’s baby.

Some of these cases were quite savage, but they offered a cathartic relief from the stresses of the job. To hear about other people’s troubles in a form so far removed from their own lives and human contacts was in some way a more comfortable experience than dealing with the patients at the clinic. One thing that was particularly reassuring was to realize how lucky they were in England not to be picketed day and night by hordes of anti-abortionists, or “pro-lifers” as they liked to call themselves. So when Nurse Susan White, a large, imposing middle-aged veteran of the old nursing school, flopped down in front of the TV with a cup of coffee, it was to disconnect from the outside world before the start of her shift in ten minutes time. She certainly had no intention of getting involved in a major, inter-jurisdictional legal dispute.

She liked her coffee strong but milky and the machine never quite got it right. She also liked it sugary, and the machine usually did get that right. It was quite hard for her to get a coffee break, even though she was entitled to three per shift, because the other nurses always came to her with the problems, both personal and professional.

The TV was on in the background, as usual. At the moment it was tuned to Fox News. But the sound was down because there was no one in the room and the last people there had been a trio of nurses who preferred to gossip than to watch the idiot-box. A woman was talking and then a face came on that caught Nurse White’s attention. It was not a talking head, but photograph, almost like a mug shot. Sue White wanted to hear more.

She picked up the remote and pressed the button to increase the volume. The voice over of an American female reported could be heard. It was one of those generic, female anchorwoman voices, the kind that all sound alike, the trained confident voice that always carries a trace of sarcasm or bitchiness, but only the merest hint. It was as if bitchiness was a required professional quality. Or maybe it was just the hard edge that was required to make it in what once had been a man’s world.

“Dorothy Hafaman never had a happy life. She was bullied at school, her parents broke up when she was in her teens and she never had any friends. It was said that her closest relationship was with her brother. Just over nine years ago, on the twenty third of May, 1998 – the day of her high school prom – Dorothy Hafaman disappeared, never to be seen again.”

The picture changed to that of a man whom the nurse didn’t recognize, and this one looked even more like a mug shot.

“Clayton Burrow is the man accused of murdering Dorothy Hafaman. At the time when she first disappeared, she was classified merely as a missing person. It was widely assumed that the harsh treatment she received at the hands of her classmates, like Carrie in Stephen King’s famous novel, prompted her to run away and go into seclusion or anonymity. There was some speculation that she had committed suicide, although no body was ever found.”

Susan White raised the Styrofoam coffee cup to her lips with a growing sense of unease. The picture of Burrow disappeared to be replaced by the well-groomed, dark-haired reporter, a thirty two year old woman in a smart blue suit, with a mid-length skirt and slightly tight jacket, designed to emphasize her firm, athletic figure, without over-emphasizing it.

“Foxy news” was how one of the young male nurses had described it, whenever he saw her. The joke was wearing thin now, although it had sounded clever the first time.

In the background the grim, bland façade of San Quentin state penitentiary was visible.

“However,” the reporter continued, “all that changed just under eight years ago, on the nineteenth of October 1999, when the police, acting on an anonymous call, found parts of Dorothy Hafaman’s body in Clayton Burrow’s freezer. They also found other incriminating evidence, hidden under the floorboards, which Burrow was unable to explain, such as a bloodstained knife with Burrow’s fingerprints and bloodstained panties with semen traces. DNA matched the semen to Clayton Burrow and the blood to Dorothy Hafaman. There was also evidence that Dorothy Hafaman had bought some expensive jewellery with money from her trust fund shortly before she disappeared. But none of it has never been found.”

Nurse White felt something wet and hot on her wrist and fingers. She realized that her hand had shaken and she had spilt the coffee. She put the cup down and wiped her hand on the front of her uniform. But she didn’t take her eyes off the screen.

“Despite his protests of innocence, Burrow was unable to explain away the evidence against him and on the twentieth of February 2001, he was found guilty of murder with special circumstances. Just over a week later he was sentenced to death. Now he is scheduled to die in just over fourteen hours. Martine Klein, Fox News, San Quentin.”

Nurse White practically fell out of her chair.

9:52 PDT

“As you say, Alex, a quid pro quo.” Dusenbury turned to Mrs Hafaman. “Esther, maybe you’d like to explain.”

Esther Hafaman sat up slowly. It was a struggle, but she forced herself. Alex sensed her difficulty as he watched her painful movements. He adjusted his chair to face her, even moving slightly to make it easier for her to look at him.

“Mr. Sedaka,” – her voice was shaky – “I do not know you, but you are a good man. At least I have been told that you are a good man.”

Alex nodded politely. There was no much he could say really. To agree would be arrogant; to disagree, ungracious. In any case that was clearly just the preamble to what she wanted to say.

“I know that you only came in on this case recently and I know that you have a duty to help your client.”

Again he nodded, trying to make it re-assuring. Whatever she was about to say, he knew that it was painful. It must have cost her a lot to reach the decision to ask the governor to grant clemency to the man who had murdered her daughter.

“Mr. Sedaka, in Hebrew your name means both ‘charity’ and ‘righteousness’ and I hope those are ideals that you live up to.”

Like Esther Hafaman, Alex was Jewish and although he had long ceased to practice the religion of his childhood, he still remembered much of what he had learned about it in the first 14 years of his life. He knew about the meaning of his name, or rather the Hebrew word ‘tsedaka’ from which the family name Sedaka was derived.

“I am dying Mr. Sedaka. I have cancer of the pancreas and the doctors have told me that I have at most a few months left to live. In her lifetime, I was estranged from my daughter, for reasons too complicated to go into. One of my biggest regrets is that we never got the chance to make it up.”

“Was this shortly before she died?”

Alex didn’t know why he had asked it. But he sensed that it was more than just idle curiosity.

“No this was several years before she died. I always thought – I always hoped – that the passage of time would heal the wounds. But it was not to be. We were never reconciled.”

She took a deep breath and appeared to be struggling to speak.

“To outlive ones own children is a terrible thing Mr. Sedaka. But if there is one thing worse than to outlive ones children, it is to part from those we love on bad terms. And that is the pain that I will carry with me to my grave.”

Her eyes were welling up with tears now and Alex almost felt as if he too were about to cry.

“It is too late for me now to be reconciled with my daughter and I do not know if we will be at peace with each other in the next life, because I do not know if there is a next life. But there is one thing that I want to do in this life and that is to give her a proper burial… or… at least to know where she is buried.”

Now, at last, it was all falling in to place. The body was never found, and although the evidence was well-nigh incontrovertible, Burrow insisted that he was innocent.

Alex turned to the governor.

“So let me see if I’ve understood this correctly. You want me to get my client to reveal where he has dispo¬— where he has buried the body. And in return for this, you have asked for Burrow to get clemency and serve a sentence of… Life without parole?”

Dusenbury nodded. Obviously the governor wasn’t going to give Burrow a complete amnesty. Alex turned to Esther Hafaman.

“That is all I ask, Mr. Sedaka. That is a mother’s dying wish.”

Alex lowered his eyes, afraid now that he was going to cry. How, he asked himself, could my client have been so evil as to do what he did? How could he be so cruel as to put a mother through this?

But he quickly cut off the thought. It was not for him to judge his client. It was not even for him to believe that his client was guilty as long as Burrow maintained his innocence. Of course he had a duty to put the offer to his client. Maybe now at last Burrow would come clean. Alex had never really believed that Burrow was anything other than guilty. Of course as a lawyer, Alex had a professional duty to act on his client’s instructions and to argue that his client was innocent as long as that was what the client maintained. But there is no authority on earth that can issue a formal ruling that is binding on human nature, much less on human thought.

Alex had assumed that Burrow was guilty before he had even taken on the case, just from the news coverage when the original trial took place and through the long and tortuous appeals process. By the time he was asked to take the case, he already had a pre-disposition of Burrow’s guilt. But he was persuaded to take the case by the pleading of his legal intern and by the formal personal request of Burrow himself, which was made for reasons which Alex had never quite understood.

Although Alex had speed-read the trial transcript, working in an intense pressure-cooker atmosphere as the execution date loomed up ahead, nothing he had read had in any way changed his mind about Burrow’s guilt. Although the case was too complicated to be described as “open and shut” it was certainly sufficiently overwhelming to be reliable. There was no doubt in Alex’s mind: Clayton Burrow had murdered Dorothy Hafaman.

The only question was would he now come clean, now that he had a chance to save his miserable life in exchange for something so small? There was no chance of him being retried and acquitted, no chance of him being released from prison, so it would cost him nothing to tell the truth. And if there was a God, it might even save his soul.

Alex knew better than to approach the matter with anything so presumptuous as expectation. He would approach it, instead, with cautious hope.

But first he had to be sure that he had understood the terms of the deal correctly. He turned towards the governor.

“So let me get this straight. The deal is, if Clayton Burrows reveals where the body is buried, he gets clemency and will serve a sentence of life without parole.”

“That’s right,” Dusenbury responded with a nod of his patrician head.

Alex considered for a moment, asking to have the terms set in writing. But from the look on Esther Hafaman’s face he knew that this would be needlessly cruel. And from his memory of the governor’s firm handshake, it was also unnecessary.

10:03 PDT

“Life without parole,” Alex had said. The man in the car couldn’t believe it. And the governor had replied: “That’s right.”

There was no doubt. The offer was on the table and the governor meant it.

The man’s mind was reeling. When the governor invited Alex to come early for the meeting, he had wondered about what was going down. He had known that it was likely to be something unusual. But he hadn’t expected that.

He kept going over the conversation in his mind, even though he had it recorded and could listen to it at leisure.

His name was Nathaniel Anderson and he was not a G-man. Neither was he a cop, nor a journalist nor a hired assassin nor anything that might in any way be thought of as cloak-and-dagger. He had recently graduated from law school and was working as a legal intern while preparing for his bar exams. He had done a lot of public defender work in his final year of law school, helping indigent client’s plea bargain down their sentences, in the proverbial meat-grinder that was the criminal law system.

It had taken time to win their respect. They saw him as a stuck-up white boy, like most lawyers. But he had worked like a dog and won them over through his sheer tenacity and hard work. And because he worked for the public defender he had also built up a powerful list of contacts in the criminal community. It was a list that had come in useful.

So the governor was offering Burrow clemency in return for revealing where the body was located. He wondered how the public would react to that – wondered also if the governor or Alex Sedaka would publicize it before hearing Burrow’s response.

Probably not.

Nathaniel looked around at the traffic on Golden Gate Avenue. Parked a few cars down the road was a limousine. He looked up. The sun was higher now: the day was wearing on. Just under 14 hours till Burrow was due for the lethal injection. It left him cold. He felt nothing. Neither joy nor regret. All it meant was closure. And it was closure that he really wanted.

He looked back at the limousine and wondered if it was the vehicle that had brought Mrs. Hafaman here. He didn’t want to see her. But that was all right. He knew that he would be gone in a minute.

Keeping his eyes on the rear view mirror, he waited while the next couple of minutes went by. Finally there was activity from the entrance to the building and several people emerged at the same time: Mrs. Hafaman, the limo driver and Alex Sedaka. Alex watched while the limo driver led Mrs. Hafaman back to the limo, opened the door to let her in, closed it behind her and went to the driver’s seat. He continued watching while the limo drove off past him, heading east towards Larkin Street.

As Alex turned away, Nathaniel strained to see the look on his face in the rear view mirror. In fact, Nathaniel could easily have looked back directly, but he preferred not to do so. Instead, he pulled out the earpiece and put it away in the glove compartment.

In the rear view mirror he saw Alex approaching. Nathaniel reached forward for the ignition key as Alex opened the front passenger door and got in.

“I assume you got all that, Nat?” said Alex, pointing to Nat’s cell phone.

“Every word. So what’s it to be? The office?”

“No, I think we’ll pay a little visit to San Quentin first.”

 

10:05 PDT

A shrine.

That was the only way you could describe it: a shrine that radiated outwards from the mantelpiece above the mock fireplace.

The picture sat there in the centre of the mantelpiece – a teenage girl smiling at the camera, or at least trying to smile. With Dorothy you could never tell if the smile was real, because she had learned from an early age to wear her face as a mask. Was it a smile of joy? Or the painted greasepaint smile of the clown who had to go on and perform even as he was grieving on the inside?

The picture was flanked by a pair of candles and the surrounding area of the wall was adorned by her tennis certificates and poems. Around the room her trophies were liberally distributed across several coffee tables and glass-fronted cabinets.

Apart from the memorabilia, the only furniture in the room was an armchair and a small television set.

The young man stood before the picture, staring into the eyes, trying to decipher the enigma. Were they happy? Had she ever been happy? Had she ever had the chance to be happy?

She had always treated him with love and kindness, however badly she was treated. He felt the tears in his eyes. Why couldn’t they have loved her as she loved him?

He felt himself choking and he switched on the television to distract himself. There was bound to be rolling news and ongoing reporting about the impending execution of Clayton Burrow. He looked at his watch. It would all be over in less than 14 hours.

10:08 PDT

“Do you think he’ll bite?” asked Nat, keeping his eyes on the road. He had just taken the first left at Larkin Street and was about to take another at Turk Street.

“I don’t see why not. He wants to live… I think.”

“Even if it’s behind bars? For the rest of his life?”

“He’s a narcissist,” Alex explained. “He likes to be the centre of attention and to be told what a great guy he is. He’s wants to be the Fonze.”

“The Fonze?”

“Fonzie… from Happy Days.”

“Happy Days?” echoed Nat, betraying his youth, as they hung a right at Van Ness.

Nat was half-pretending. In truth not only had he heard of Happy Days, he even enjoyed watching the re-runs of it – and he knew perfectly well who the ‘Fonze’ was. But he still didn’t see what it had to do with his question about Burrow taking the deal.

“A sit-com set in the late fifties and early sixties. The Fonze was the local school drop-out who didn’t care about anything except being cool. That was his trademark phrase. The thing was, everybody liked him, the guys and the dolls.”

Nat smiled.

“And this is relevant because…”

“Because that’s what Clayton Burrow always wanted to be. Cool, like the Fonze. A hit with the clique. Numero Uno. Mister Popularity. In with the In-Crowd. Like I said – a classic narcissist.”

“I know that type. But I still don’t see what that’s got to do with taking the deal.”

Alex smiled. Nat may have got top grades in law school, but he had a lot to learn about the real world.

“The thing is Nat, that what a narcissist wants most is attention. But the next best thing is to live. He wants to live – and even if it is behind bars, to him that’s still living. He’ll still be the centre of attention for a while, with the press… and the public… until the novelty wears off.”

Nat thought about this for a moment.

“He’s never admitted it… killing the Hafaman girl I mean.”

“I know. But until now he’s never had a reason to. In fact he had every reason not to.”

They were taking a left into Lombard Street now and a tense silence settled over them. Strangely, Alex found himself thinking not about Burrow, but about Nat.. The truth was that he hadn’t originally planned on hiring a legal intern, his law practice was just too tiny to need one. But Nat had badgered his way into Alex’s professional life with dedication and tenacity. He had started off the campaign while still a student, with an impressive résumé and a series of letters praising Alex’s work. At the time, Nat was doing a pre-graduation internship with the Public Defender’s office.

But the coup de grace was an impromptu visit to Alex’s office. When Alex had politely offered a referral to another firm, Nat replied that he didn’t want to work for the “whores and heathens” of the legal profession. He wanted to work only for a true believer in justice. Alex wasn’t sure if the student was a genuine meshigena or just a younger incarnation of himself, with the ideals still intact. But the clincher came when Nat silenced Alex’s attempted rebuff by saying that he wanted to play St Peter to Alex’s Jesus. It was the kind of killer-line that a lawyer would give his Rolex – if not his Rolodex – to come up with. And it caught Alex from left of field.

Nat’s arrival at the firm had been most opportune in terms of the caseload. Alex had been getting a lot more business in the wake of a major success in the appeal of a drug baron’s girlfriend on accessory charges. And this heavy workload had culminated in Alex’s biggest case of all when the California versus Burrow file landed on his desk. There had been so much material to read through, so much ground to cover. Alex still wasn’t sure that he had truly come to grips with the facts of the case.

But the execution date had been set and the court had refused to give him any more time.

“You want me to copy the recording?”

Nat’s voice punctured Alex’s cogitation. They were on Doyle Drive, heading north towards the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Oh, er… Yes. Upload a copy on the mail server and lodge a CD copy with the bank. Get Juanita to do a transcript. We’ll compare it to the official transcript when we get it.”

Throughout Alex’s meeting with the governor, they had maintained an open cell phone connection with Alex’s brand new iPhone on silent and Nat listening in and recording the conversation. Nat had declined to go into the governor’s office with Alex, despite Alex’s desire for back-up.

“I need a witness,” Alex had said, “in case there’s any dispute afterwards about what was said.”

But Nat had been insistent, without offering any explanation. He didn’t want to go in to meet the governor, almost as if there was some personal animosity between them. And that was final. Alex knew better than to press him. Nat had his eccentricities and Alex knew that he was too useful a worker to pressurize if he really felt strongly about something. He had done a sterling job on the Burrow appeal in general. If he didn’t want to go in to meet the governor for personal reasons, that was good enough for Alex.

10:17 PDT (18:17 BST)

“Are you all right Sue?”

Susan White had been daydreaming. She was barely into the first hour of her shift and her mind was a million miles away. She became aware of a young nurse looking at her.

“Oh yes. I’m fine. I was just thinking about something.”

The young nurse was dark-haired and pretty, with a smile that reminded her of some young actress who had made it big in Hollywood after several appearances in British movies. She couldn’t remember the name of the actress. It was all she could do to remember the name of the nurse.

Danielle. Yes that was it. Danielle Michaels.

“You sure?”

Danielle was genuinely concerned, Susan White could sense this.

“Yes I’m fine. Don’t worry. Really I am.”

Danielle smiled again and walked off, glancing back over her shoulder briefly, with a look of concern. She had only started working there a couple of weeks ago, and it was rumoured that she did drugs. Not a hardened junkie, just a casual user. She had a turbulent relationship with her boyfriend and it was also rumoured that her brother and sister were both drug dealers.

But that wasn’t what was bugging Nurse White right now. She had no time for rumours. She was only concerned with facts. And right now, the fact that was uppermost on her mind was that news report about the man who was about to be executed.

But were the cases connected? She didn’t know. But she had to be sure.

The first thing she did was go for the records room. The room was unlocked but the cabinets were not. It was out of hours and the records manager wasn’t there. Then she realized that she didn’t actually need the whole file, just the index. The hard copy files were filed but consecutive number and physically stored by date. But every file had a matching card in the card index and these were arranged alphabetically. The index card would have the date.

She found it in less than a minute and a chill went up her spine. The file had been opened on the 25th of May 1998. That was nine years ago, just like the TV reporter had said.

There was no getting around it: the dates matched.

 

10:36 PDT

When they arrived at the prison, Alex again went in alone, while Nat waited in the car. But at the State prison, at least, Alex was used to this. From the very beginning, Nat had made it clear that he had no wish to meet Burrow.

“I don’t want to know him face to face. I don’t want to know him as a person.”

“Why?” Alex had asked. “You think he’s guilty?”

It was Nat who had pushed hard to take on the Burrow case in the first place.

“I don’t know whether he’s guilty or not. But he should never have been found guilty on the evidence presented in court.”

“Then why not meet him? That might allay your doubts.”

“Or reinforce them,” Nat had replied. “I can handle the not knowing. It’s like an agnostic who defends freedom of religion and freedom from religion.”

This indeed had been Alex’s attitude too. Except that Alex would have taken it one stage further and said: “he’s probably guilty but still shouldn’t have been convicted on such flimsy evidence.”

Of course, the first time Nat had driven Alex to meet with Burrow, the lawyer had found the intern’s attitude incomprehensible.

“How do you expect to work as a lawyer on cases of your own if you’re afraid that you can’t compartmentalize you’re emotions?”

But Nat had just shaken his head and turned away, as if struggling to contain those emotions.

“I can’t do it,” Nathaniel had almost cried. “Not yet.”

Alex was mystified – just as he had been puzzled by Nat’s refusal to attend the meeting with the governor – but realized that he had to accept it. Whatever psychological baggage Nat was carrying, he couldn’t shake it off and wasn’t ready to share it with anyone else.

So on this case at least, Nat was functioning as little more than a driver. It was hardly a way to get ahead in his chosen profession. But in fairness to Nat, he had done a lot of background research. You couldn’t fault him for effort or enthusiasm. If he needed to keep Burrow at a distance to maintain that enthusiasm, then so be it.

Alex knew that with maturity came the capacity to meet the most obnoxious of clients and put personal feelings aside. But he wasn’t going to push it with Nat. Nat had to find his own way. That was the path to maturity!

It took a few minutes to process Alex through security. But it seemed to be getting quicker. They knew Alex now and he knew the drill, so less had to be explained to him about what he could and couldn’t bring in. Also, as the execution date drew near, they realized the urgency of these meetings and there was an element of sympathy for even the basest and most evil of murderers. Years on Death Row humble and mellow a man and even those prison guards who believe most strongly in capital punishment are ready to admit that by the time the condemned man is about to meet his maker, he is a very different man to the one who was sentenced to that fate.

Whatever they say about capital punishment being the ultimate individual deterrent, it is a punishment that eliminates the need for itself. It is living in the shadow of death that reforms a man’s character, not death itself. But for collective deterrence, the death penalty served no purpose, Alex felt. But there were others who were all too ready to argue the point.

When Alex was finally in the cell with Clayton Burrow, the condemned man appeared to be struggling to read the lawyer’s face.

“What did he say?” asked Burrow, the tremor of fear creeping into his voice.

“It’s kind of complicated,” Alex replied hesitantly.

“What do you mean?”

Burrow’s breathing was heavy, as if not daring to hope.

“He’s offering you clemency – but it’s conditional.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he’s ready to commute your sentence to life if you ‘fess up.”

“That’s it?” said Burrow, letting the air out of his lungs.

“No, there’s one more thing. You’ve got to reveal where you buried the body.”

This wiped the smile from the condemned man’s face.

“Fuck it!” yelled Burrow, pounding his left palm with his right fist. “God damn fuck it!”

Alex was looking at his client, puzzled.

“Why, what’s the matter.”

“I can’t do it! I can’t fuckin’ do it!”

10:39 PDT

It had been most kind of Chuck to lay on a limo, Esther Hafaman thought.

The overpass drifted away behind them. But Esther was past the stage of admiring the view. On the way there it had been a distraction from her worries. She didn’t drive, and illness had left her pretty nearly housebound. So any journey like this was an escape, both mental and physical. But the novelty soon wore off.

The same was true of the limousine. The luxury of its leather upholstery and lacquered wooden panelling raised her pleasure level by a microscopic degree. But such petty pleasures were short-lived when ranged against the quantum of suffering that had borne down upon her in recent years. First a murderer’s unbridled malice had claimed her daughter. Then the ravages of disease selected her at random and struck her down with a death sentence of her own.

She had had her fair share of life and although it hadn’t always been a smooth ride, it was a fair crack of the whip. She could accept being singled out by the grim reaper to the inclemency of illness. But it was the loss of her daughter that had been unforgivable: for that was the work of human agency. And she blamed not only Burrow but also her husband.

Yet it was precisely from this anger that she wanted to escape. That was why she had approached Dusenbury with a mother’s dying wish and persuaded him to offer clemency to Burrow. As her own fate loomed up ahead, she needed closure more than revenge. And that was also why, as she closed her eyes now, she felt herself drifting back to a happier time.

She couldn’t understand why, but of all the memories that flashed through her mind, the one that lodged itself and lingered at the forefront was the one-night stand.

They were both students: he celebrating the end of his tentative first year at law school; she celebrating completion of her finals for AB in Literature. It was one of those drunken student parties where everyone knows someone but no one knows everyone. Even now she didn’t remember how they had ended up in the sack together. Yes the drinks had been flowing freely. Yes he was handsome. Yes they had both been sitting in the corner, trying to withdraw from the rowdy celebrating and wild carousing, that had long since lost its appeal for both of them. She wasn’t the cerebral type like him, more the romantic type. But she was the quiet type. That much they had in common.

She was also engaged, to decent if somewhat cold man whose family was “

Reviews

Showing 1 - 4 of 4