“Ms. Wayne,” I asked, “has someone ever murdered a man right in front of you?”
I could see by his puzzled expression that Nicholas had no idea what I was talking about.
She got it, and she laughed.
“If you mean a certain Italian, I’d probably help you bury the body,” she said.
She thinks Nicholas is Italian, but he’s Sicilian. That made me feel better.
“I told Olivia that you’re under suspicion for breaking and entering and possible destruction of evidence in a murder investigation.”
“But you haven’t been charged with anything,” Olivia Wayne said.
“No.” Not yet.
“Good. Most people wait to contact a criminal defense attorney until the prosecution is already on track. I like to get ahead of that train.”
“Come inside,” I said. “I’ll make coffee. Or would you like some lunch?”
“No, thanks,” Olivia Wayne said. “Nick already fed me.”
“That was nice of him,” I said.
She chuckled. “Our friend knows the persuasive quality of grilled salmon.”
I’ll just bet he does.
Inside the house, I greeted Tuffy and Emma. Tuffy nuzzled me and wagged his hindquarters at Nicholas, but Emma, seeing the stranger with us, scurried away.
Eileen had left a note for me on our personal mail drop, the hall table. I scanned it quickly and told Nicholas, “Eileen walked Tuffy when she got home from the school at three thirty. We must have just missed her.”
I turned around to see Olivia Wayne kneeling in front of Tuffy, giving him a two-handed scratch that he was clearly enjoying.
“He’s magnificent,” she said. “We had a black standard when I was growing up. If I’m ever in a situation where I have the time to give to a dog, this is what I want.”
Her affectionate reaction to Tuffy made me warm to her. Just a little. Perhaps this was what Nicholas meant when he said that Olivia Wayne and I had something in common. Then I wondered what kind of relationship they had so that he would know what kind of dog she had when she was growing up.
“Where did you get him?” she asked. “What breeder?”
“He was a rescued puppy,” I said. “My late husband found him abandoned on the Rancho Park Golf Course. The groundskeeper said he’d seen him dumped out of a car the night before. Mack took him to a veterinarian to find out if he’d been micro-chipped. No chip, and no one put ads in the paper looking for him. We got lucky.”
Olivia Wayne stood up. “It seems to me that he got lucky, too.”
If you work a jury the way you just worked me, I’d want you on my side.
I led Nicholas and Olivia into the kitchen, started a fresh pot of coffee, and invited them to sit down at the table.
Eager to put on some mascara and lipstick and get into my own clothes, I said, “Just give me a minute to go and change.”
“You’re fine,” Nicholas said. To my amazement, he looked as though he meant it. “We’ve just got a short time before I have to take Olivia back to her office.”
“Nick, you go into another room for a few minutes until we call you back in,” his favorite criminal defense attorney said.
Apparently, Nicholas expected that. With a pleasant smile on his face, he got up and headed toward the living room. Tuffy stayed with me.
When he was gone, she said, “Della, give me a dollar. I need that so whatever you tell me will be privileged.”
I was still carrying my purse and Liddy’s shopping bag. I took a dollar bill out of my wallet and handed it to her. “You work cheap.”
She laughed. “We’ll see if you think so should it turn out that I have to defend you. There was a famous criminal defense attorney way back in the old days. Jake Ehrlich was his name. I read his autobiography, A Life in My Hands, when I was in college. To defend someone for murder he charged everything they had. When a client balked, he’d ask, ‘What’s your life worth to you?’ ”
I thought, I’d give up anything except Tuffy and Emma. But what I said was, “Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that point.”
“What do the police think they have on you?”
She already knew that Keith Ingram had been murdered at the charity cook-off gala. I told her about breaking into Ingram’s house, that I’d left a fingerprint behind on a broken window, and that Detective Hatch had used that evidence to get a warrant to search my house and vehicle.
“Did they find what they were looking for?”
“No.”
“I’m not going to ask you why they didn’t. I can guess.”
I didn’t reply.
Olivia Wayne smiled at me. “You know when to keep quiet. Good. Did you admit to breaking into Ingram’s house?”
“No, but I didn’t have to, because they have my bloody fingerprint.”
“Blood.” She frowned and made a tsk sound. “That’s not good. I can discredit fingerprint evidence against you, and probably get it excluded, but a DNA test will nail you. However, in spite of what those pseudo-science TV shows tell you-I call them Detecting for Dummies-you don’t get DNA results in an hour, or forty-six minutes plus commercials and promos. A properly run test to a ninety-nine-plus certainty result takes weeks. But because you left blood at the scene, the trick will be to turn police attention away from you and onto somebody else in that window of time.
“Now, before I tell Nick he can come back in, is there anything else you need to say to me in confidence? I’m deliberately not asking what you might have taken from Ingram’s house, and what might have happened to it. If that imaginary thing can’t be found, then it can’t walk through the door to bite us in the ass. And I’m not asking why you’re dressed like a hospital employee. That’s peculiar, but it’s not relevant to our association, unless you wore it to commit a crime and did, in fact, commit some infraction.”
“No crime. No intent to commit one.”
“Then I don’t need to know about it.” She raised her voice, called Nicholas’s name, and in a few seconds he resumed his seat at the kitchen table.
“I’ve told Della that I can challenge the fingerprint evidence against her if I have to, and can probably get it quashed,” she said.
“But I don’t understand how you could do that,” I said. “I thought fingerprint evidence was the gold standard for convictions.”
“Yes and no,” she said. “When prints are properly harvested and correctly matched, they are proof that a certain person was in a certain place. But they can’t tell an investigator when that person was in that place. And the Achilles’ heel, so to speak, of fingerprint evidence is that there’s been so much sloppy lab work that last year the National Academy of Sciences released a scathing report on inept or inexact forensics.”
“The FBI is supposed to have the nation’s best crime lab,” Nicholas said, “but back in 2004 they wrongly identified an Oregon attorney as a terrorist because of a wrong fingerprint match. That’s just one example.”
“I read that the government had to pay the lawyer two million dollars for that little ooops,” Olivia said. “But I’m sure he would have preferred not to have endured the hell he went through before the error was admitted. Here’s the thing, Della: I can twirl the LAPD lab guys into a bowl of spaghetti on the fingerprint issue, but you better hope that they find Ingram’s killer before they get a DNA match on your blood and start leaning on you. They can lean real hard.”
Olivia looked at her watch. “I gotta go.” She took a card out of her purse and handed it to me. “This has all my numbers.” She reached down to give Tuffy a final scratch beneath his ear.
“I’ll call you later,” Nicholas said to me as he followed his “favorite criminal defense attorney” toward my front door.