Claim of Innocence

“Salt & Pepper Diner. On Lincoln. Half an hour?”

Theo’s lean, muscled body curled tighter around me. He lifted my hair and began to kiss the back of my neck.

“An hour,” I said. Theo pushed his pelvis into mine and began to nudge my legs open. “An hour and a half,” I said.

Salt & Pepper Diner looked like Chicago in the 1950s—red leather booths and a shiny silver counter where you could sit and watch men in white paper hats cooking pancakes.

After my time with Theo, I was famished. “I’ll have the Popeye omelet,” I said to the waitress, handing her my menu.

“Toast or grits?”

They sounded delicious. “Both.”

Mayburn handed over his menu. “Scrambled eggs. Egg whites only, please.”

“Toast or grits?”

“Neither.”

“Fruit?” the waitress offered.

He shook his head silently.

“Sliced tomato?”

He didn’t even look at her. Just shook his head again.

I gave him a once-over. He was thinner than usual. His brown hair, which he’d been wearing stylishly messed over the last year, was hidden under a Blackhawks baseball cap. The dark blue jeans and the polo shirt he wore hung on him, when he usually wore things more fitted. Mayburn was at least ten years older than me, I knew, but right now he looked more than that. The lines around his eyes were set deep.

“What’s up?” Mayburn said.

I thought about asking the same thing, but I knew he preferred to deal with work first. He wasn’t someone who disclosed his personal business very easily. I told him how Maggie had recruited me to work on Valerie’s case, that we needed his help.

“What can I do?” he asked.

“I’m not exactly sure.” I thought about Valerie’s face when she said, I didn’t do it. Maggie said we didn’t have to know such things as Valerie’s criminal lawyers, but I was having trouble separating myself as a person from myself as a lawyer. I’d never had such a struggle when I was a civil lawyer.

“Let’s break it down,” Mayburn said, leaning forward. “Just start at the beginning.”

I took a sip of water, and then I told him everything I knew, which wasn’t that much, really. I wondered how Maggie could do this on a regular basis. How did she work with such a relatively limited amount of information from her clients? When I was a civil lawyer and I had a trial, I knew exactly what every witness would say because I’d taken their depositions or I’d made them fill out interrogatories or both. The trials there were more about shading the information, drawing out some bits and burying others to persuade the jury that your side was right. But this criminal thing was a whole different matter. There had been no depositions and little other pretrial testimony to plan our trial strategy. We had no idea what was going to happen. We couldn’t plan, couldn’t pretend we were in control of anything.

It struck me that the same was true of life—you could attempt to be in control of all the information that came at you, could even attempt to control the direction of it, but ultimately, you realized that life was unpredictable as a jury in Cook County. Control was an illusion.

Mayburn listened. He leaned toward me when he seemed to need clarification; he nodded when he got it.

When I came to the end of what I knew about the case, I said, “That’s it, basically. Our client says she didn’t commit the crime. So far, she won’t say who did, or if she even knows who did. We don’t know if she’s lying, and Maggie tells me none of this matters. But I want to know. So I guess we need to look at everybody in the case. Everybody.”

“What if I dig up something bad about Valerie? Something that’s not out there yet? Do you have to tell Maggie?”

I chewed my bottom lip the way Maggie did when she was thinking hard. “I think so. But I’m not sure. I just know that I might have to take a backseat on the case or maybe get off it altogether if I don’t personally believe Valerie.”

“You sure you want to go down this road?”

The waitress delivered our food. We thanked her, but neither of us picked up our forks.

“I have to.” I nodded, then repeated, “I have to. Can we start with background checks on all the players?”

“Sure.” Mayburn pulled out a pen and a tiny notebook from his back jeans pocket. “Name ’em.”

“Bridget and Valerie and Amanda, the victim.” I thought about the photos the state had used during opening arguments. Amanda appeared to be the kind of person Maggie and I would be friends with. The fact that I was representing someone who had allegedly killed her was jarring. I needed to know the real story. “Zavy, the husband. They had a live-in nanny named Sylvia Zowinski.” I spelled her name for Mayburn. “And…” My voice trailed off as I thought hard. “Those seem to be the people who might know something.”

“If you can get social security numbers, the states they’ve lived in, birth dates, anything…” Mayburn said.

“I’ll collect what I can from Valerie and the police records. I’m going to be studying the records all weekend to get ready to cross Vaughn.”

“Detective Damon Vaughn?” That drew the first smile of the day from Mayburn. “I gotta be there to see that.”

“Monday morning.”

He gave a smile and a long nod. “If you give me Maggie’s files, I’ll read them and see what I can find.”

“There’s not much there. But hey, you’re the one who always says investigations are like puzzles, and you just have to start collecting the pieces, right?”

He raised his eyebrows with a grudgingly impressed expression. “I thought you didn’t listen to me.”

“I don’t listen to you when doing so will get me in trouble.”

He scoffed. “Like when?”

“Are you kidding? What about when you made me get into Lucy’s house and download Michael’s hard drive and Michael came home? There was no time for the series of checks you told me to run. I couldn’t listen to you.”

He chuckled a little. We looked at each other. I think both of us heard the words—Lucy, Michael—hanging there.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“How am I doing?” Mayburn echoed. “I am doing distinctly shitty.”

“Will you be okay?”

“No.” He said it simply, not like he was feeling sorry for himself, but rather like he was being matter-of-fact. “I’ve always wondered what was wrong with me, why I didn’t want to commit to someone before this.”

“You wanted to commit to that gallery owner you dated. What was her name?”

“Madeline Saga. I guess you’re right. I did want her to commit. I even bought my house in Lincoln Square hoping she’d move in. But in retrospect, I think I wanted that because she told me she didn’t. It was the ultimate challenge.”

I looked at Mayburn, at his sad face, his eyebrows drawn together. His skin appeared grayish now that I looked closer, as if he wasn’t hydrated.

“Have you been boozing?” I asked.