A Good Marriage(81)

I’d been told by reception that, despite our 11:45 a.m. appointment, Wendy Wallace had yet to arrive. It was already 12:15. Sitting there waiting, staring up at oil paintings of DAs gone by, it occurred to me that maybe Wendy had only agreed to meet because she’d never intended to show.

Finally I heard high heels down the marble hallway from the elevators, like a clacking of knives. Wendy Wallace. Surely she assumed I was there to discuss a plea deal. She was not going to be pleased by the bait and switch and the last thing I wanted was to be asking for her help. But if I could somehow manage to get the prosecution to look into Xavier Lynch themselves, it would be a far better alternative.

When Wendy Wallace emerged from the hallway, she looked even more beautiful than she had in court: pale blue eyes set off by her silver hair, sharp gray linen suit and black heels. She held her head up, peering down her nose like a sphinx. I stood, hoping it would make me feel less intimidated. It did not.

“Counselor,” she said, expertly unreadable. “Come back to my office. You’ll be more comfortable there.”

Would I, though? Everything with Wendy Wallace felt like a puzzle encased in a lie. Surely this was why Paul remained stuck on her. She was probably one of the few people who had ever left him choking on dust.

Wendy Wallace’s office was crisply decorated with a few designer touches—a Herman Miller chair in the corner, a signed print on the wall—that probably reflected the money she’d gotten from Paul. Certainly they were not paid for with her ADA’s salary alone. But nothing too ostentatious either. Precisely enough to signal that she was worth substantially more than her yearly income might suggest.

Wendy motioned toward a guest chair. “What can I do for you?”

I sat. But too upright. And once Wendy was seated across from me, I had no choice but to maintain my overly erect, exhausting posture.

“I need your help,” I began.

“My help,” she repeated with an awful calibrated flatness.

“I’ve found Amanda Grayson’s father.” I pulled Amanda’s most recent journal out of my bag. “He was stalking her.” I held up the journal for emphasis. “I believe there’s a very good chance he killed her. He needs to be interviewed, immediately.”

It was a risk, pulling this ace out of my sleeve. Wendy would now be ready for this alternate theory of the crime, once we got to trial. But if this case got that far, I had to hope I’d have figured a way out of representing Zach by then.

“Her father?” Wendy’s eyebrows pulled together and her nose wrinkled slightly. She eyed the journal.

“I’m not one hundred percent sure I’ve found him, but I think so,” I said. “He raped her as a child, and he’s been harassing her since they returned to New York. He’s been in Park Slope, following her. It’s documented in her journal.”

“Your client killed his wife, Counselor. I don’t need to consult her journal or talk to her father to know that.”

Was her response a shade too emphatic, though? Like maybe she wasn’t one hundred percent sure of anything. I understood her not being thrilled to open up some can of worms. As a prosecutor, I never would have made it my business to go around interviewing random family members in search of alternative theories that might conflict with mine. You used evidence selectively to build on your story, not because you were an evil asshole, but because you believed your story. But genuinely exculpatory evidence was a different matter. No prosecutor would ignore that, not even Wendy Wallace. It could be career ending.

“Amanda Grayson’s father was stalking her, and she was terrified,” I said more forcefully. I waited a beat for her face to register concern. It did not. “I think he killed her.”

“Ha,” Wendy said quietly. She looked genuinely amused. “You know, I wasn’t worried about Paul, because I know how to throw him off his game. But I’d heard you were like a tenacious little dog at the US attorney’s office. Thank you for making it abundantly clear that description was not intended as a compliment.”

Annoyingly, my cheeks flushed. And Wendy’s eyes gleamed.

“The police need to talk to the father. Someone needs to check his alibi. Have your investigators even seen these journals? They were under the bed. Amanda recorded dates and times—phone calls, occasions her father was following her. It’s potentially ex culpatory.”

Wendy was nodding thoughtfully. It seemed I might finally be getting through to her. But then she suddenly shook her head, as though coming to.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you say something? I heard the word potentially, and then my brain exploded inside my skull.”

“Look, I don’t think it’s so unreasonable to expect—”

“Oh, it’s clear that you don’t think,” she snapped. “Your client is a millionaire. If you want to go on some wild-goose chase that’s not going to lead anywhere but straight back to him, be my guest. He’s going to pay for it, though, not the taxpayers of the state of New York. We’re not obligated to run down every stray fact just because you think it might ‘potentially’ lead somewhere. They also didn’t interview your client’s high school friends, or his dentist. So fucking what? None of that’s relevant just because you think it could be. But I’ve got an idea: I’ll subpoena all those journals just in case. Take them right off your hands. That way we can be sure to take our time reading them.”