Page 3 of The Happy Month

When I walked past Lydia’s office, she said, “Dom, can you come in, we’ve a lot to talk about.”

“One sec, let me grab my project list.”

“I bought you a coffee.”

“Thanks,” I said, as I rushed to the large open space in the back where I kept my ‘desk’. I wasn’t wearing a coat; it was summer and already close to eighty. I kept my keys and wallet in my Dockers. A few moments later, I was sitting across from Lydia with my project list. I took a sip of the latte she’d bought me.

Lydia was about ten years younger than I am, putting her around thirty-seven, thirty-eight. Her hair was coal black and had a tendency to fall over one of her eyes. She had a sexiness that she fought to hide. A battle she rarely won.

“We’re deposing Anne Michaels on Wednesday afternoon at two o’clock. I just got the call from her attorney.”

“Awfully early for calls.”

“Yes, I think he was hoping to get the answeringmachine. He’d leave an innocuous message, then I’d call back and he wouldn’t be available. He’d try again during lunch. Then he’d be unavailable when I called back…”

“Phone tag.”

“Exactly.”

“But you answered the phone, so you won.”

“I did win,” she said with a small, satisfied smile.

Anne Michaels, née Whittemore, had been a witness in the trial of Larry Wilkes for murdering his boyfriend, Pete Michaels, in 1976. Anne perjured herself by claiming to be Pete’s fiancé. She’d done so at Larry’s suggestion. She’d later married the victim’s brother—a story just like a movie Ronnie and I had recently watched on video,While You Were Sleeping.Only this was more like,While You Were Dead.

Anyway, she’d recently agreed to recant her testimony.

“I do have some bad news,” Lydia said. “Well, not-good news. I’ve been doing research and the admission of artwork as evidence is challenging. It’s very likely it won’t be admissible.”

She’d agreed to take the case based on artwork by a deceased witness which impeached his testimony. He’d done page after page of drawings, almost like one of those new graphic novel things, that showed him procuring the gun and then giving it to someone not Larry Wilkes.

“What does that mean?”

“I think we need to get a new trial without it. If I try to use it to get the new trial and a judge rejects it, then I’d have trouble trying to get it in if we got a new trial another way.”

“Okay, what’s the issue?” Not being a lawyer, it wasn’t obviously apparent to me.

“Artwork may or may not be true. Without the artist there to testify, there’s no certainty. It’s possible I might beable to get it in at trial since it does support reasonable doubt. But as you know, the standard is different for a habeas corpus petition.”

“Absolute certainty.”

“Basically.”

The artist, Andy Showalter, had killed himself several years after the trial. He’d testified that he’d bought a gun in Compton at Larry’s request. The gun used to kill Pete Michaels. There were holes in Showalter’s story, but the defense hadn’t pointed them out.

Raymond Harris was the public defender. To date, he’d provided only a very thin file on the case. A file that should have included discovery from the AD’s office but didn’t. He was prominent on my project list.

“When will we have Raymond Harris in for a chat?” I asked.

“He’s scheduled for Friday morning. He promises he’ll bring the rest of Larry’s files at that time. He’s just got to find them.”

Her tone was bitter. It was hard for her to respect lawyers who lost files.

“What do I need to do to prepare?”

“I’ll be reading through the entire trial from beginning to end. The main focus of the meeting will be asking about the questions Harris didn’t ask. There will be things you’ll need to follow up on. We have a half an hour conference call with Larry on Friday afternoon.”

“New cases?”