Page 36 of Lies He Told Me

He collapses on me, all but smothering me in a way that would feel like smothering if it were anyone else, but it’s David. It’s my husband.

“No, don’t move,” I whisper as he starts to pull out. “Stay here. Stay with me.”

This is it. This is what I want.

We can handle anything if we’re together.

“Money’s just money,” I whisper. “We can figure something out if we have to. We could take out a mortgage. We could sell the house and get something smaller.”

“I could sell the restaurant,” he says, still catching his breath. “We could move to freakin’ Hawaii and start over.”

“You could teach math,” I say.

“You could go back to criminal defense.”

“Whatever we want,” I say, still coming down from the high.

“Whatever we want,” he says. “A fresh start.”

I don’t know how serious we are, but there’s a certain thrill to envisioning it. It is possible. We can do it.

“If you believe it hard enough, you can make it be true,” David whispers.

THIRTY-THREE

I STILL REMEMBER THAT morning fifteen years ago, Halloween morning. I was in my law office, sipping a Star-bucks coffee and getting ready to draft an appellate brief, when my secretary buzzed me on the intercom with two breathless messages: Howard Shimkus was on the phone, needing to speak with me “urgently,” and two FBI agents were in the outer office, demanding to see me.

Taking a call from one of our senior partners took priority. “You’re not gonna believe this, Marcie,” Howard said. “Silas Renfrow is dead.”

“Silas is … he’s —”

“All three witnesses in that secret detention center. They got to all three witnesses. They’re all dead. They stormed the place, killed all the marshals, then the three witnesses, then torched the place. Burned everything and everyone to a crisp.”

I remembered Silas’s words to me only weeks earlier — there was no chance he’d survive long enough to testify against Michael Cagnina.

“The FBI just paid me a visit, some guys from the Springfield office,” said Howard.

“What a coincidence. I have two FBI agents waiting outside my office right now.”

Those agents, to say the least, were agitated. Even more so when they questioned me about everything I knew, to which I politely but firmly replied that anything Silas and I discussed was protected by attorney-client privilege.

“Lady, half a dozen US marshals were killed along with the three witnesses,” said the lead FBI agent, a guy named Francis Blair, as if that fact allowed me to make an exception to the most sacred rule a lawyer follows.

And besides, what could I tell them? That Silas predicted that Cagnina would somehow discover the location of the secret detention center and rub out the people testifying against him? I didn’t see how that would help anyway.

Eventually the agents left, and I read online about what was being called the Halloween Massacre. It had taken place up north in a suburb of Rockford, a town called Roscoe, where the detention center was located. The three witnesses shot, decapitated — decapitated! — and set on fire. A half dozen US marshals killed in a gunfight. The whole detention center torched.

It wasn’t until a week later, when Howard finally completed his long fraud trial in downstate Illinois, that he and I had a chance to talk about the whole thing at length. We were at the bar at the Union League Club, Howard drinking Scotch, me a glass of wine. By then, the shock had worn off. The Halloween Massacre had taken on celebrity status, and no lawyer enjoyed notoriety more than Howard.

He’d even started to have a sense of humor about it. “To Silas,” he said, raising his glass — not his first — of Scotch. “We hardly knew ye. Literally. We never saw your face; we never heard your real voice; and we had no fucking idea where we were when we visited you. Now.” He patted my arm. “Give me stories. A blow-by-blow of everything you discussed.”

So I did. How Silas preferred talking about anything other than the charges against him. How he tried to get to know me personally and talk about myself. How he even started getting a little too personal, including what I took to be a reference to suicide. “He said something about ‘pulling a heron’ or something and saying goodbye.”

Howard’s round head whipped in my direction. “He said what? Say that again.”

“He said if he could ‘pull a heron’ and say good —”

“Oh, shit. Sweet holy motherfuck.” Howard fell back against his chair, losing the color in his face. Then he reached for my arm. “Who have you — wait, you didn’t — tell me you didn’t say this to the FBI.”

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