MD05 - The Confession Page 4

  The wheels start to turn. “Where do we start?” he asks.

  The conventional wisdom says the police start with the victim and the defense attorneys start with the accused. “I need you to tell me where you were the night Ms. Concepcion died.” I purposely leave out any mention of the bloody knife with his fingerprints. It’s the only information I’ve gleaned from the cops and I don’t want him to start adjusting his story to account for it–at least not yet.

  He hasn’t been living in a cloister and he cuts to the chase. “Are you asking if I did it?”

  Absolutely not. It’s always tempting to ask a client straight up, but that isn’t how defense lawyers work. If he lies to us, we’ll have to deal with unpleasant issues relating to California’s perjury laws. I want to hear it in his own words. More importantly, I want to study his body language. Non-verbal cues and significant omissions often tell you much more than anything your client says. “They didn’t pull your name out of a hat,” I tell him. “I need to know what happened–and I don’t like surprises.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  So much for my attempt to elicit a narrative by asking open-ended questions. “The cops think you did. I need you to give me enough information to prove that you weren’t in the vicinity of Ms. Concepcion’s apartment last Monday. I’ll explain everything to Banks and Johnson and you can go back to work.”

  No response.

  “Come on, Ramon. You have to be straight with me.” You’d better be straight with me.

  He clasps his hands together and says, “There’s a problem.”

  Uh-oh. “Which is?”

  “I was at Maria’s apartment on the night she died.”

  Chapter 6

  “Her Personal Life is Confidential”

  “Above all, our parishioners expect us to keep their private matters confidential.”

  — Archbishop Albert Keane. San Francisco Chronicle.

  I start firing questions in rapid succession. “What were you doing there?”

  “Counseling.”

  “For what?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  It is now. “I need to know everything you can tell me about her.”

  “Her personal life is confidential.”

  Good priests are obsessive about privacy. “So is this conversation,” I say.

  “Come on, Mike. You know the rules.”

  All too well. I get him to reveal grudgingly that she came to him after she broke up with her boyfriend in September. “Who is he?” I ask.

  There is a long hesitation before he says, “Eduardo Lopez.”

  I recognize the name. Concepcion’s ex has operated a popular eatery at Twenty-third and Mission for three decades. An astute businessman with political aspirations, he’s used the profits from his restaurant to make a killing in real estate. A devout Catholic with time and money on his hands, he’s also formed several partnerships with government agencies and nonprofit organizations to build low-income housing in the community.

  “Why did they break up?” I ask.

  “Maria wanted a commitment, but he didn’t.”

  It’s an all-too-typical scenario. Maybe we can get him some couch time with Dr. Phil.

  Ramon adds, “The situation was complicated by the fact that he’s still married.”

  Oops. “I take it Ms. Concepcion was aware of that?”

  “Yes. He promised to divorce his wife and marry her.”

  Seems he never got around to it. This may be a little more than Dr. Phil can handle in a one-hour show. I ask if Lopez’s wife knew about her husband’s infidelities.

  “Yes, and she wasn’t happy about it.”

  I want to know where Lopez’s wife was last Monday night.

  “Maria was forty-two and desperate to have a child,” he explains. “She figured Lopez was her best chance–and maybe her last.”

  When I was a priest, the rules were written in black and white. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the many shades of gray. I think back to our conversation in the confessional and observe, “You’ve become pretty forgiving of pre-marital sex and infidelity.”

  “You shouldn’t judge until you’ve walked in somebody’s shoes. She had the best mental health that money could buy, but she was still unhappy.”

  “Unhappy enough to commit suicide?”

  “No.”

  He gives me the name of her therapist, but isn’t forthcoming when I probe for additional details. I change course and ease him into a discussion about the night she died.

  “I drove to her apartment at eight o’clock,” he says.

  It’s just a few blocks from St. Peter’s. “Why didn’t you walk?”

  “It was raining.” He says he stayed until ten and assures me that she was very much alive when he left.

  “Was she upset?”

  “Yes.”

  One word answers are profoundly unenlightening. “Why?”

  “The O’Connell case was starting the next day and her plaintiff was getting cold feet.”

  I let his answer hang. People often feel compelled to fill the dead air, but Ramon doesn’t elaborate. I ask him if he entered her apartment through the front door or the back.

  “Front.”

  “Did you leave the same way?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Maybe none. I want to know if anybody may have seen you.”

  He tells me he left through the back door because his car was around the corner and it was quicker to go through the alley. He didn’t see anybody outside.

  “Did you eat anything while you were there?”

  “I had an apple and a cup of tea.” He holds his palms up and says, “This would go a lot faster if you just told me what you wanted to know.”

  I tell him about the bloody knife with his fingerprints.

  Ramon gets indignant. “You think I killed her?”

  “Ramon, you know and I know that an explanation would make my life a lot easier.”

  He’s still mad. “I cut the apple with a knife. It could have been the same one they found in the bathroom.”

  “How did it get there?”

  “How should I know?”

  I can do without the sarcasm, but his adamance suggests he’s telling the truth. The cards are on the table and I want to fill in details. “Will the cops find your prints anywhere else in her apartment?”

  “I was there for two hours,” he says. “My prints are probably all over the place.”

  Swell. “Did you touch her?”

  “I hugged her when I left. It was platonic.”

  I wasn’t going to suggest otherwise. “Where did you go?”

  “To St. Peter’s. I had a lot on my mind, so I did what priests do–I prayed.” He says the church was empty and it’s unlikely that anybody saw him. Then he went for a walk around midnight and he returned to the rectory at one. “I said good night to Father Keyes.”

  For our purposes, this means nobody can corroborate his whereabouts between eight and one. We’ll have a problem if the medical examiner concludes that the time of death was during that window. I send up a final flare. “Did she say anything else that seemed unusual?”

  “Yes. She said that somebody was following her.”

  What? “A stalker?”

  “A private investigator.”

  Huh? “Why would somebody have hired a PI to follow her?”

  “She was looking for witnesses to testify against Father O’Connell and she figured the attorneys for the archdiocese were keeping an eye on her.”

  All’s fair in love, war and litigation.

  He lowers his voice. “You’d better watch your backside,” he says. “Francis Quinn and John Shanahan play hardball. They may put somebody on your tail, too.”

  It’s a new and unusual twist to the concept of professional courtesy, but I take his warning seriously. It gives me the creeps if I think I’m being followed.

  “There’s something els
e,” he says. “She was having issues with her ex-husband. He still works at John’s firm and never got over the fact that she filed for divorce.”

  “Why did they split up?”

  “Among other things, he had a different concept of fidelity than she did.”

  Asshole. “Did he know she’d been seeing Lopez?”

  “Yes. She told me that he was jealous and had a temper.”

  It doesn’t prove anything, but it’s another possibility. “What’s his name?”

  “Dennis Peterson.”

  “Why didn’t she ignore him?”

  “She couldn’t. I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “He’s the lead attorney for the archdiocese on the O’Connell case.”

  Chapter 7

  “Do You Understand the Seriousness of this Matter?”

  “We are certain that Father Ramon Aguirre will be fully exonerated and our prayers are with him for a speedy resolution of this matter.”

  — Father F.X. Quinn. KGO Radio. Wednesday, December 10. 7:00 A.M.

  The caffeine from Rosie’s second Diet Coke has kicked in as we regroup in my cramped office at the world headquarters of Fernandez and Daley at seven-thirty on Wednesday morning. She’s already running at full throttle when she asks, “Are you ready to go to war with the DA?”

  “Of course.”

  I’ve been up all night and my temples are throbbing. I take a sip of Peet’s House Blend and admire our unfinished walls. We run a low-overhead operation on the second floor of a tired walk-up building a half block north of the crumbling Transbay bus terminal in space that’s better suited for a garage band than a law firm. Our tenant improvement budget went to pay for Tommy’s diapers and we put our remodeling plans on indefinite hold when our former partner and my ex-girlfriend, Carolyn O’Malley, was appointed to the Superior Court bench six months ago. Our downstairs neighbor, the El Faro Mexican Restaurant, won’t open for another four hours, but the pungent aroma of yesterday’s special is still with us. Our staff–such as it is–consists of a receptionist/jack-of-all trades named Terrence “The Terminator” Love, a former heavyweight boxer and small time hoodlum who was more successful at stealing than fighting. We’ve logged more than our share of hours trying to keep him out of jail since our days in the PD’s office and we put him on the payroll to help him comply with his latest parole agreement. So far, it’s worked out for everybody–he gets to stay out of jail and we get somebody to answer the phone. He also doubles as my bodyguard when I venture to the earthier parts of town.

  “What about the archdiocese?” she asks. “F.X. Quinn couldn’t have made it any clearer that he doesn’t want us on this case.”

  “Been there, done that,” I say. “We’ll deal with him, too.”

  “He isn’t going to make our lives any easier.”

  “Ramon gets to pick his own lawyer and we’ve dealt with our share of assholes.”

  Her eyes narrow when she says, “You can’t let it get personal. This case has nothing to do with what happened twenty years ago and you need to keep your head together if Francis Quinn starts yanking your chain.”

  “I will. Besides, we’re theoretically on the same side.”

  “For now.” She asks me about Concepcion’s ex-boyfriend.

  “Lopez is no Boy Scout,” I say, “but he has a high profile and political aspirations. I find it hard to believe he’d throw it away in a fit of anger.”

  “And her ex-husband?”

  “If he really wanted to get her, he would have tried to embarrass her at trial. That’s what lawyers do. In fact, I’ll bet he was looking forward to taking her on in court.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  I wink and say, “Ex-husbands know all of their former spouses’ weaknesses.”

  “If I were in your shoes,” she says, “I wouldn’t try to extrapolate that theory to other situations.”

  I know better. “The case is over if we can prove it was a suicide,” I say.

  “It won’t be easy to get Rod Beckert to change his mind.”

  Dr. Roderick Beckert is a walking encyclopedia of forensics who has been our chief medical examiner for almost four decades. “Even if it wasn’t a suicide,” I say, “the fact that they found Ramon’s prints on the knife doesn’t prove that he killed her. If he’d had the presence of mind to try to try to fake a suicide, he would have been smart enough to wipe the prints.”

  “Then how did the knife find its way to the bathroom?” she asks.

  “That’s our job to figure out.”

  Her eyes bore into mine. “Bottom line,” she says, “do you think he did it?”

  “Ramon isn’t capable of murder.”

  “For what my two cents are worth,” she says, “I happen to agree with you.”

  It doesn’t change a thing, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks so.

  # # #

  Judge Louise Vanden Heuvel’s long blonde hair is pulled back into a tight ball as she glides to the bench with commanding elegance at exactly ten A.M. Her courtroom is packed with reporters and Ramon’s supportive parishioners, but the veteran judge’s stoic demeanor suggests it’s just another day at the office. She dons her reading glasses, turns on her computer and studies her docket, then she bangs her gavel once and invokes an even tone that is equally authoritative and seductive as she instructs the gallery to be seated.

  My hair is flat and my shave is spotty, but I’m presentable enough in my gray suit. The defense table is crowded. Rosie is to my left and Ramon is to my right, and Quinn and Shanahan are squeezed in at the end. Our show of numbers may appear impressive to the uninitiated, but it’s unlikely to have any significant bearing on the outcome of today’s proceedings.

  Bill McNulty is a veteran ADA with a reputation for aggressive tactics, compulsive attention to detail and a grouchy demeanor. He looks unhappy as he stands by himself on the other side of the aisle. “McNasty,” as he’s known around the Hall, has put in over thirty years in the trenches and could phone in an arraignment. He knows today’s proceedings will be short. Ramon will enter a not guilty plea and I’ll beg for bail. Then we’ll all go outside and plead our respective cases to the cameras.

  The lawyers state their names for the record and Judge Vanden Heuvel reminds us that we’re here for the purpose of listening to Ramon’s plea. After we dispense with a formal reading of the charges, she turns to Ramon and says, “Do you understand the seriousness of this matter?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” he whispers.

  Quinn decides to make a play to the crowd. “Your Honor,” he says, “on behalf of the archdiocese, we object in the strongest terms to these unsubstantiated accusations.”

  Duly noted. His sermon isn’t going to change anything, but it elicits a smattering of applause from Ramon’s disciples in the gallery.

  The judge bangs her gavel. “Father Quinn,” she says, “your client will have ample opportunity to present a full defense. For now, we need to hear his plea. If you’d like to discuss any other issues, you’ll have to take them up at the appropriate time and in the proper venue.”

  “But Your Honor–”

  “How does your client plead?”

  I’m glad she’s taking out her frustrations on him. I turn to Ramon and nod. His voice cracks when he says, “Not guilty, Your Honor.”

  “Thank you, Father Aguirre.” The judge looks at her calendar and says, “I’m setting a preliminary hearing before Judge Tsang a week from Friday at nine A.M.”

  Not a great draw. Ignatius Tsang is a scholarly jurist who used to be an ADA. I’ve always gotten a fair shake from him, but he’s generally regarded as prosecution-friendly.

  “Your Honor,” I say, “we would like to schedule the prelim as expeditiously as possible. Father Aguirre hopes to celebrate Christmas Mass at St. Peter’s.” It’s a reach, but I have her attention. I want to pressure McNulty to reveal his evidence. More importantly, I want the reporters in the galler
y to think I have no doubt that Ramon is innocent.

  “What did you have in mind, Mr. Daley?”

  At least she didn’t dismiss me out of hand. By statute, the prelim must be set within ten days after the arraignment, but the judge can speed up the timetable. “We’re prepared to begin on Friday,” I say.