Perri O'Shaughnessy - Case of Lies

Sandy was still saying it couldn’t be true, but Wish just stared at Nina as she tried to encompass the enormity of Hanna’s lies.

Finally she said, “Remember what Jimmy Bova told me at the Ace High? Flint attacked him because he thought Bova might have shot Sarah. But Bova convinced him he didn’t.”

Sandy’s eyes narrowed into an expression Nina didn’t recognize. Her face changed. Her nose stood out prominently, nostrils wide. Her lips became a thin line.

“I’m starting to believe it,” she said. “Because the next man Flint went to see, the very next day, was-”

“Our client,” Wish said. “He started in on Mr. Hanna, but then the police came after Roger Freeman called 911 and Mr. Hanna must have gotten the gun away from him. Mr. Hanna tied Flint up, not the other way around.”

“But Flint was making Mr. Hanna talk on the phone,” Sandy said, “wasn’t he?” and an expression Nina did recognize, of horror and rage, came into her face. Nina felt it, too. The hidden variable had revealed itself like some cold demon riding through a dark sky, trailing misery and bloodshed.

“Hanna had good luck and bad luck,” Nina said. “He did struggle with Flint, and he got the gun away from him. I imagine the police were just arriving. He didn’t know what to do at first, so he did nothing.”

“And outside, everyone believed it was a hostage situation,” Wish said.

Sandy said, “He was safe that whole time? I don’t want to believe it, because then that man is so cruel. Cruel!”

“Letting Roger and everyone worry,” Wish said. “And he was fine, he was just trying to figure out how to keep Flint from talking.”

“Cruel,” Sandy repeated, shaking her head. Nina closed her eyes and thought back to the awful moments in Placerville when Dave was talking to her on the phone, pretending to relay Flint’s statements.

It was Dave, cruel Dave, who had told her it was all her fault.

When it was really Dave’s fault, Dave who killed his wife and tried to hide his secret, Dave who obstructed Nina’s efforts to find Sarah’s killer.

But Dave couldn’t know then that the robber whose gun he picked up and used wasn’t a random robber, wasn’t some punk off the streets of downtown Reno.

Lee Flint didn’t know who had killed the woman whose death he was being blamed for. He watched and waited for two years while the police investigation fizzled and the civil case wheezed toward dismissal. Then, when Nina came in, he started his own investigation. And he started covering his tracks, eliminating witnesses.

“Hanna piggybacked on Lee Flint’s robbery,” Nina said. “Flint got blamed for Sarah’s murder. He hadn’t killed her. But he couldn’t afford to be caught. To stop the investigation from leading to his robbery, he decided to kill Silke and Raj-”

“And you, too, and Elliott. Flint thought Chelsi was you,” Wish said. “We’re lucky you’re still with us.”

“So Dave Hanna killed his wife,” Sandy said. “I’m gonna believe it. I’m gonna go down to Placerville and kill him myself for killing his wife and lying to us and making you feel like you pulled the trigger on those people.” Her face had turned purple. She stood up.

“Mom?”

“Break his scrawny little neck.” She went into the outer office and Nina and Wish started to follow her. “Feed him to my horses. Don’t try to stop me.” She was putting on her coat.

Nina said, “Sandy, take your coat off, please. Dave’s incredibly dangerous. Do you guys realize he must have shot Flint there at the end, while Flint was tied up and probably gagged?”

“It’s sickening,” Wish said. “He’s sickening. Cheney told me not to talk to Hanna. I think he’ll be arrested within a few hours. What do we do, Nina?”

“He’s still our client, even though he’s a lying, murdering sack,” Nina said. She was trembling with rage.

“Do we warn him?” Wish asked. “Should I go down to Placerville and try to help him?”

“You mean kill him,” Sandy said. “Don’t you?”

She still stood at the door in her coat. Nina thought of all the hours Sandy had put in to help Hanna, the deadlines, the phone calls, the hours in Placerville worrying for him. She and Wish had also been betrayed. Wish walked over to her and put his arm around her and said gently, “Mom, come on back here and sit down.”

Nina said, “Wish, call Roger Freeman and ask him to come up here. Use some pretext. I don’t want him in Hanna’s house when the arrest goes down. Sandy, draw up a Withdrawal of Attorney in the Hanna case. Make copies and date it today.”

“We’re abandoning him?” Wish said.

“We signed on to help him sue the man who killed his wife,” Nina said. “He had to sue, or it would seem as though he didn’t care. But the whole case is a lie. There is no case.”

“Where are you going?” Nina was pulling her hiking boots on.

“For a walk. The trail down to the lake. I want to feel some clean snow on my face.”

“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” Sandy said. “You do know that?”

“All I know is that Bob can come home now,” Nina said.

She went to the morgue. She had to see Flint.

He was on a gurney, post-autopsy, covered with a sheet. She pulled it back and stared at his scarred face. He looked younger than she had thought. In the way of the dead, he gave nothing back except the empty calm of eternity.

Bastard! she told him. He didn’t answer. She had never seen him alive. She would never fully understand him. Unknowable, he had escaped her by dying before she could tell it to his face, tell him, Got you, got you.

Got you. Selfish and doomed, he rested in peace.

She had one more call to make. Four hours later, in the evening, after Cheney called to tell her that the arrest had gone down quietly, she went to see Dave Hanna at the Placerville jail. The drive down the hill went slowly because of the drifts and she welcomed the chance to think some things through.

“You took your time,” Dave Hanna told Nina through the glass in the visitors’ room at the Placerville jail. His ruddy face showed fright. “I only got to make my phone call an hour ago. The cops said I was under arrest for Sarah’s murder. That’s all they would tell me. It’s all a big-”

“Let me bring you up to date, Dave,” Nina said.

She told him about the gun, the fingerprint, the bruises on Flint ’s body.

Hanna began to cave in as she talked. He slumped and said, “Oh, shit,” several times. When she finished, he started to cry. Nina watched him do that.

After a few minutes, when the sobbing and hiccuping had died down, Nina said, “Why did you do it, Dave?”

“I don’t like the way you’re looking at me. This is-still confidential, right?”

“I’m still your attorney. It’s confidential.”

“Why’d you have to open up the whole thing?”

“Why’d you kill her?” Something in her voice must have shaken him.

“It just happened,” he said. “I snapped, I guess.”

“What does that mean?”

“We saw the robbery from the balcony, then the man in the mask ran one way and the kids took off toward their rooms. I told Sarah to stay put and I ran down the stairs.”

“Why?”

“I saw the gun lying on the concrete. I don’t know why, I just wanted it. I picked it up. It was hot, alive. I wanted to use it on something. I looked up and Sarah was standing on the balcony looking down at me. And she knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That I was thinking, I’d like to shoot her.”

“Oh?”

“She already knew. So I pulled the trigger and made it real. I was surprised myself. I heard a noise and I thought, Drop it and run back up and yell. So I did that and I had just made it a few steps up when the motel clerk came around the corner, and I stopped.” He grimaced. “Later, I felt really bad about it.”