Guardian of Lies by Steve Martini Read Free Book Online Page A

she is still strikingly beautiful.
    Harry Hinds, my partner, has insisted on coming along this morning, whether to confirm this fact or to save me from myself, I am not sure. But it seems that Harry now has a stake in all of this. Without realizing what they were doing, the cops have rung Harry’s bell. As a result we may be in this for the duration.
    Strange as it sounds, it was the police who came knocking at our door yesterday morning, not Katia who called. Among the items the cops found in her purse when they arrested her was my business card. This piqued their curiosity. Following the murders and the suspect’s arrest, authorities wanted to know what I knew, in short, how my card had gotten into her purse before the events, if, in fact, that was the order in which things had happened.
    They asked specifically whether she had ever been to my office on a legal matter regarding business. I told them no. They asked if I’d ever been to the house where she was living with Emerson Pike in Del Mar. Again I told them no. So there was no lawyer-client relationship? No. That opened the floodgates. What did we talk about? They wanted to know every detail. When I explained the quixotic manner of my meeting Katia, in the market that morning two weeks ago, and our conversation over coffee immediately afterward, they seemed to back off.
    And that was the only time you met or talked with her? Yes.
    Of course, by then it didn’t matter. It was too late. Someone, somewhere leaked to the media that a lawyer’s business card identifying me by name was found in the suspect’s purse. It has been all over the local news for twenty-four hours, the breathless nonstory of the lawyer who may be involved. So now Harry wants to know what the cops know. It has become a game of lawyers’ tag, and for the moment it seems that I am It.
    So this morning we are busy pulling together the details, the few things that we think we know, how the police caught up with Katia in Arizona on a bus halfway to Houston, where she was headed. According to the newspapers, because the police have not officially confirmed it, they tracked Katia from a cell phone signal, a phone she had stolen from the man she was living with, her friend, the coin dealer who now is dead, along with his household maid. This is the basis for all this unpleasantness and one more reason why you might want to think twice before shopping for bananas on a Saturday morning in Del Mar.
    I must admit that I never connected Katia by name with the crime until the police knocked on my office door. There is enough crime in this part of the state that one more murder, more or less, doesn’t always catch your attention, even if it’s blaring from the evening news. But after the cops left, I went diving for the papers, everything I could find in print since the night Emerson Pike was killed.
    Using the public defender, Katia is to be arraigned on two counts of first-degree murder tomorrow morning. At the moment, I’m not sure that we can help her. The mountain of incriminating evidence seems almost overwhelming. Harry and I have consulted the public defender to ensure that we are not stepping on toes. We have established an attorney-client relationship for the purpose of evaluating whether we might take the case. For one of those nefarious reasons that lawyers sometimes seize upon, the public defender was quite happy to have us do this. Why? Because, if nothing else, it will keep me off the stand as a witness.
    Katia’s lawyer can’t be sure what his client may have said to me the day we met or how such an innocuous and innocent episode might be dressed up or drawn out to look incriminating if I were forced onto the stand; the specter of another older man being hustled by the young, alluring suspect. The best way to inoculate Katia from this is to draw me into the case. Once I talk to her, even tangentially, as lawyer to client, my testimony is verboten. The prosecution probably couldn’t even