Chapter 2
The Client
The Ninth Precinct station house smelled the way they all smell, of burnt coffee and floor wax and the particular sour warmth of too many people breathing in a closed building. I had been inside perhaps two hundred of them. I could have told you with my eyes shut which one I was in. This one had a radiator that knocked twice and then sighed, a bench by the front desk that someone had carved their initials into, and a framed photograph of the mayor hung slightly crooked above a fire extinguisher.
It was ten minutes to seven. The rain had followed me inside on my coat.
The desk sergeant was a heavy man with a gray mustache who looked at my card, then at me, then at my card again, with the expression of someone who has been told a rumor and is now being introduced to it. "He's in Interview Two," he said. "They've been going at it since one."
"Going at what? I understood it was voluntary."
"It is." He did not smile. "Nobody's stopped him from leaving."
"Has anyone told him that?"
The sergeant looked at the ceiling. It was an answer.
I was met in the corridor by two people who had clearly been waiting. The first was a man of about fifty, thick through the shoulders, with a tired, slightly bulldog face and a brown suit that had stopped being pressed at roughly the same time as his marriage. Detective Sergeant Ray Dunleavy. I knew him by reputation: thirty years on the force, nineteen in Homicide, a man juries liked because he did not seem to want anything. The second was a woman, tall and spare, with silver in her short hair and a gray wool coat that she had not taken off, standing a little behind him with a leather folder against her chest.
"Mr. Cole," she said. "Dana Whitlock. District Attorney's office."
I had faced her twice before, once in a drug-conspiracy case that settled and once in an assault trial that did not. She was forty-five, and the best-prepared prosecutor in the building, and she had a habit of waiting a half-second before answering a question that made opponents want to fill the silence. I had learned to enjoy it. Today I did not.
"You're here early," I said.
"So are you." She tilted her head. "It's a very quick response time, for a man who hasn't been called."
"Mr. Hale called me."
"Mr. Hale," said Dunleavy, "has been telling us a lot of things."
"I'm sure." I put my hand on the door of Interview Two. "Detective, I'm going to ask you to stop that conversation, as of now. I'm going to ask you to turn off the recorder. And I'm going to speak to my client alone."
"Your client," said Whitlock softly, "has not been charged."
"Then he's free to go with his lawyer."
She held my eyes for a half-second. Then she nodded.
There is a photograph I sometimes think about, from a case early in my career: a man at a table, under a hard overhead light, with his hands folded in front of him as if for prayer. It was a man who had confessed to something he had not done. He had looked, in the picture, perfectly calm, and it had taken me a long time to learn why. People who have been told that their life is over have a way of going very still.
Victor Hale was not like that.
He was sitting at a steel table in a room the size of a closet, under a fluorescent tube that made everyone look as though they had recently been exhumed, and he looked like a man waiting for a delayed flight. He was big, six foot two or three, broad across the chest, with thick iron-gray hair swept straight back off a high forehead and a face that had been handsome once and had become something better: lined, intelligent, composed. He wore a charcoal suit that had been slept in and a white shirt with the collar open. His tie was folded neatly on the table. His hands lay on either side of it, large and still.
He rose when I came in. I had not expected that.
"Mr. Cole." He held out his hand. His grip was dry and warm and exactly as firm as it needed to be. "Thank you for coming. I'm sorry about the hour."
"Mr. Hale, I'm very sorry about your wife."
"Yes." He sat down again. "Thank you."
It was the pause that I noticed. Not the words, which were correct, but the pause in front of them: a single beat, very short, in which his eyes went past my shoulder to the blank gray wall and came back. I had watched hundreds of men and women say thank you to condolences. Most of them said it too fast. A few said it too slowly. I had no idea, yet, what an unhurried thank-you meant. It might have been grief. It might have been control. It might have been a man deciding which of the two to show.
I sat down across from him and put my legal pad on the table.
"Before you say anything," I said, "I want to explain what's happening. I'm a criminal defense lawyer. I don't work for the police, the District Attorney, or the State. If you retain me, everything you tell me is privileged, which means I can't repeat it to anyone without your permission, and neither can anyone I work with. It also means you should be very careful, in this room, about what you choose to say. I won't judge you. But I need to understand one thing first."
"Whether I did it," said Victor.
"No." I clicked the pen once. "I don't ask that."
His eyebrows went up a very small distance.
"I ask what the State can prove," I said. "That's all I'm here for. Whether you did it is between you and whatever you believe in. If you tell me, I'll hear it. If you don't, I won't push. But I won't go into a courtroom and say you're innocent. I'll go in and say they haven't proved you guilty. Those are different sentences, and I need you to understand why."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled. It was a tired, rueful, intelligent smile, with a flicker of something underneath it that might have been relief.
"The papers said you were direct," he said.
"The papers say a lot of things."
"They said you were a bastard." He considered it. "I find I'm reassured." He leaned back, and the metal chair creaked. "Mr. Cole, I'll tell you what I told them, and then I'll tell you what I didn't, and you can decide what to do with it. I did not kill my wife."
I said nothing. I wrote the time at the top of the page.
He told it in order. I will give it here as he gave it, because it matters, and because I have since had occasion to read it back, in my own handwriting, more times than I can count.
On Tuesday evening he had come home from the office at about six-thirty. Eleanor had been in the garden, he said, which she often was; she was a restorer by training, a conservator of old paintings, and she had a studio in the carriage house, but she liked to be outdoors when the light went. They had had dinner. Cold chicken, a salad she had made. It had been a quiet meal. They had been, he said, "somewhat strained" for several weeks. He did not elaborate. I did not ask.
At about eight-thirty his phone had rung. A problem at the company: a shipment of refrigerated cargo held at a foreign port, a contract clause that would cost the firm eleven million dollars if it was not answered by morning. He had gone upstairs to change his shirt, kissed Eleanor on the forehead in the kitchen, and driven himself downtown. He had arrived at the Hale Meridian building at three minutes past nine. He knew the time because he had parked in the executive garage and glanced at the dashboard.
He had worked in his private office on the thirty-first floor, alone, until half past ten. He had eaten a protein bar. He had made two calls, one to a lawyer in Rotterdam and one to a ship's agent in Singapore, both of whom could confirm it. He had drafted a memo. At 10:30 he had gone down in the elevator and driven home through the rain.
At 11:14 he had pulled into the driveway. The house was dark except for one lamp in the study. He had thought nothing of it. He had let himself in, hung up his coat, walked down the hall, and opened the study door.
He stopped there. I watched his hands, which until then had been quite still. The right one moved. It closed, slowly, around his left wrist, as if to hold it down.
"She was on the floor by the desk," Victor said. "On her side. There was a good deal of—" He lifted the hand and let it fall. "I thought she'd fallen. I actually said her name. I said Ellie, and I went down on my knees, and I touched her face." He closed his eyes. "She was already cooling."
"Did you move anything?"
"I picked her up. I don't know why. I think I had some idea of putting her somewhere more—" He shook his head. "I put her down again. I called 911 from the hall telephone. I don't remember what I said."
"You touched the room."
"I touched everything. The desk. The lamp. I knocked over a chair." His voice stayed level. "They'll find my fingerprints all over that study, Mr. Cole. It's my study."
It's my study. I wrote it down, and underlined it, because it was the first thing he had said that was exactly the kind of sentence a good lawyer wants a jury to hear.
"Why do you think they brought you in?"
"Because I was the only one home." A faint twist of the mouth. "And because of the argument."
"What argument?"
For the first time, he hesitated. It was a real hesitation, not the pause from before; I could see him decide.
"Eleanor and I had a quarrel," he said, "two nights earlier. On Sunday. Our housekeeper heard it. It was not a pleasant one. Eleanor said she was thinking of leaving." His eyes came up and met mine. "I told her that I thought that was a terrible idea. I may have said some things I regret."
"What things?"
"That she'd leave with nothing." He said it quietly. "That's what the agreement says. We signed a prenuptial agreement when we were married. It was a fair one, at the time. It's become rather less so as the years have gone on." He drew a breath. "I'd like you to hear the rest from me now, rather than from them in an hour. There's also a life insurance policy. Thirty-eight million dollars. I bought it two years ago, at the advice of the company's counsel, when we were negotiating a financing. It's what they do. It names me as the beneficiary, and I'm told it's an excellent motive."
I said nothing. I understood, as one understands the shape of a room when the lights go on, that I was looking at a man who had read his own indictment and had decided, with extraordinary composure, to begin by reading it to me.
"And did you want her to leave?"
"I wanted," said Victor Hale, "my wife not to be lying on the floor of my study with her head broken open." A tremor ran through the quiet voice. It was gone as quickly as it had come. "I'm sorry. I don't know how I'm meant to answer that."
"You answered it."
"Did I?"
"I think so."
He held my gaze a moment longer. And for the first time since I had walked into that room, I felt it, the faint cold stirring at the back of the neck that comes with a client who is either exactly what he appears to be or a great deal better at it than anyone I had ever met.
I did not know which. I never asked him. That, I told myself, was the whole point.
At 8:20 the door opened without a knock, and a man in a dark overcoat came in with a uniformed officer at his shoulder, saying "Sir, you can't—" and then stopping, because he had seen Victor's face.
"Julian," said Victor.
The man crossed the floor in three strides. He was tall, like his brother, but leaner, with a narrower face, and he had the pale, shocked, gray-lipped look of someone who has been awake all night learning something that cannot be unlearned. His hair was damp. His tie was crooked. He took Victor's hand in both of his, and then, to my surprise, put his other arm around his brother's neck, awkwardly, fiercely, and held him, and neither of them said a word.
I looked away. It was the least I could do. I looked at the wall, and the single mirror in it, behind which, I assumed, someone was watching, and the radiator knocked twice and sighed.
When I turned back, Julian Hale had released his brother and was standing with one hand pressed flat on the table. He was forty-seven, I would learn, the chief financial officer of Hale Meridian, the younger by five years. He had the same eyes as Victor, the same deep-set brown, but there was nothing composed in them. They were red-rimmed and bright with a kind of helpless anger.
"You're Cole," he said.
"Yes."
"I'm Julian Hale." His voice was hoarse. "I'm the brother. Whatever he needs. Whatever it costs. I'll sign anything you want."
"Thank you. We'll talk about it." I stood. "I'll need Mr. Hale's authorization first."
"Give it," Julian said to Victor, sharply.
"Julian."
"Give it to him, for God's sake, Vic."
The uniformed officer, who had been standing uncomfortably by the door, coughed and said that there was a visitors' log in the corridor that all non-staff were meant to sign. Julian turned and went out. I followed him, because I wanted a moment, and because I wanted to see how a man like that behaved when he thought no one was looking.
He stood at the high counter outside the interview room, with a clipboard on a chain, and he bent and signed his name. I watched his hand. He took the pen in his left, curled his wrist the way left-handed people do, and wrote three quick, angry words across the page, and capped the pen, and handed it to the officer, who thanked him.
I noticed it without noticing. It is a thing I do. It went into the back of my mind with the radiator and the crooked mayor and the smell of floor wax, among a thousand other small facts that I would not need for months.
It was a Wednesday morning in October, and I was in the corridor of a police station, and I had no idea that I was learning anything at all.
They charged him at two that afternoon.
Whitlock did it herself. She stood in front of a bank of microphones on the steps of the Justice Center in a gray raincoat, with Dunleavy at her shoulder and Victor Hale's photograph, an old one, taken at some charity gala, smiling, in black tie, projected on a screen behind her, and she said the words slowly. First-degree murder. Eleanor Marguerite Hale. Evidence obtained in the course of an extensive investigation.
I watched it on a television mounted in a corner of the holding area, beside a vending machine with a handwritten out of order sign. Victor sat on the bench beside me, in the clothes he had been wearing for twenty hours, with his hands between his knees. He watched it too. His face had no expression whatever.
When it was over he said, without looking at me, "She's very good."
"Yes."
"Is that going to be a problem?"
"Probably," I said.
"I thought so." He nodded slowly. "Good. I'd hate to think I'd hired a man for the easy ones."
I did not laugh. But I felt something move in my chest that I did not like and could not name, a small hard flare of professional appetite. And I thought of Danielle Rusk's mother on the steps of the court, and then, with a kind of sick precision, I did not think of her at all.