Chapter Fifteen
Present
At noon, Detective Church sat down for lunch with Teddy Mountbatten at the Beverly Wilshire.
The meeting place had been Teddy’s idea; it was not Church’s scene at all.
They were seated on the outdoor patio, and at the table next to them, a middle-aged woman had a Pomeranian in a baby stroller.
She rocked and cooed at it as she picked at her salad, her designer shades perched high on her forehead.
Church had had to look twice to make sure he’d really seen what he had thought he’d seen.
“If I were a client, I’d tell myself not to talk to you,” Teddy said, taking a sip from his iced tea. He was sharply dressed in a designer suit and leather loafers, still handsome despite his age.
“And why’s that?” Church asked.
Teddy smiled good-naturedly. “It’s always people wanting to help that gets them into trouble,” he said.
“‘Silence is the true friend that never betrays,’ I always tell them. But people can’t help themselves.
The guilty ones are overconfident and think they can’t be caught, and the innocent ones think they have nothing to hide and share guilelessly.
I’m not sure which is worse, honestly. They both do as much harm to themselves. ”
Teddy Mountbatten was a criminal defense lawyer now, and not just any criminal defense lawyer—a very famous one.
Teddy was known for taking on headline-making cases.
His first claim to fame had been serving on the defense team for Dr. Mark Morrison, a neurosurgeon who had been accused of murdering his pregnant wife.
It had seemed, at first, to be an open-and-shut case: Dr. Morrison was the only one home at the time of his wife’s murder, and he was covered in her blood.
Later, it was discovered he’d been having an affair with a young lab technician from the town over.
But Teddy was an expert at introducing seeds of reasonable doubt and nurturing those seeds until they took root and grew, cracking the perfect facade of the prosecution’s case.
He knew how to tease out an admission, how to poke holes in a testimony, how to make a person seem untrustworthy, unreliable, inaccurate.
How to implicate and insinuate with subtle inflections or the nuanced way he worded a question.
Teddy had brought in a blood-spatter expert to argue that the perpetrator must have been left-handed, while Dr. Morrison was right-handed.
He sidled up to the jury booth when giving his arguments; he knew how to make each juror feel like he was speaking directly to them.
And they warmed to him; they couldn’t help themselves.
Teddy was handsome and charming and good at getting people on his side.
When the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty,” the public was shocked, and the world took note of Teddy Mountbatten.
“Teddy the Tenacious,” they called him. In his long tenure as a criminal defense lawyer, Teddy had never lost a case that had gone to trial.
“I assure you I’m not here to get you into any trouble, Mr. Mountbatten,” Detective Church said. “I’m just trying to establish a baseline of events from the people that were there that night. What they saw, what they remember.”
Teddy leaned forward, elbows on the table.
“Detective Church, let’s be honest with one another—no bullshit,” Teddy said.
“You have a job to do, and that is to find the person responsible for all this. And sure, I bet you’d like to find the right person.
But we live in an imperfect world. Witnesses lie or obfuscate or misremember.
Physical evidence is incomplete or contradictory or nonexistent.
You do the best you can with what you have, but in order to do your job, you must find the seemingly most right person—a viable person—nothing more.
And I am a seemingly viable person, I think we can both agree.
So let’s cut the pretense, shall we, and get straight to what you came here to ask me. ”
Detective Church shifted in his chair. He hated talking to lawyers. They had such a skewed sense of the justice system. To them, it had nothing to do with justice or truth at all; it was about winning, no matter what side they were on.
“Okay, Mr. Mountbatten,” Church said. “I’ll get right to it, then. You and Saoirse used to date?”
“On and off, yes,” Teddy said.
“And why was that—the on-and-off nature of it?” Church asked.
“I suppose because we were young,” Teddy said.
“We were long distance sometimes, and that was hard. I’d forget to call one evening because lacrosse practice ran late, or she’d think I was flirting with another girl—things like that.
We’d get into an argument on the phone, and one of us would hang up, and we wouldn’t speak for weeks. ”
“So you fought often?”
“Not any more than I would say is usual for a young couple.”
“And was it just arguments, these fights? Or did they ever turn physical?”
Teddy thought for a moment and smiled wryly. “Saoirse threw a plate at my head once,” he said, “but I ducked.”
“But you were never physical with her?” Church asked.
“Never,” Teddy said.
Church was silent for a moment. “Mr. Mountbatten,” Church said, “the family reported that Saoirse came home once from a trip she took with you to Catalina with a black eye. They claimed you were the one who gave it to her.”
Teddy had a very unusual reaction to this. He smiled, and then he started to laugh. “Of course they did,” Teddy said, rubbing his chin. “Not exactly clever—rather uninspired, actually—but sometimes that’s better. People like tropes, familiar stories, recognizable characters. It’s an easier sell.”
“I apologize,” Church said. “I’m not following.”
“Isn’t it obvious what they’re doing?” Teddy asked.
“They’re trying to cast me in this role of the violent ex-boyfriend.
Maybe I liked to knock her around a bit.
Maybe the night of the party, I saw Saoirse with another guy, I got a little jealous, and I took things a little too far.
It’s an easily digestible narrative. A jury would understand it, eat it up. ”
“Are you saying the family is propagating a fake narrative to implicate you?” Church asked.
“I’m saying they’re trying to cast doubt on my character, to undermine me, to give me a plausible motive,” Teddy said. “I should know. It’s what I do for a living.”
“And why would the family want to point a finger in your direction?” Church asked.
“Because this is what they do,” Teddy said. “They’re good at making people see what they want them to see and keeping hidden things hidden.”
“How do you mean?”
Teddy paused for a moment, as if he were unsure if he should say. “They’re very good at stories, Detective. I’m sure you know that they had Saoirse removed from school her junior year?”
“Yes,” Church said. “Saoirse had a health condition, and her brother was worried about her safety.”
“Yes, and isn’t that a pretty story?” Teddy asked. “Poor, frail Saoirse, and her big brother looking out for her, protecting her.”
“You’re saying it isn’t true?”
“Saoirse didn’t have an arrhythmia,” Teddy said. “They made that up so they could take Saoirse out of school without anyone batting an eye, without anyone becoming wise to the truth.”
“And what was that?” Church asked. “What was this truth you think they were so intent on hiding?”
“Saoirse wasn’t sick,” Teddy said. “She was pregnant.”
At first, Church was sure he had misheard him. “Pregnant?” he echoed.
“Yes,” Teddy said. “Saoirse told me so herself. She used to call me sometimes, without them knowing. She was furious with her brother for hiding her away and keeping her under lock and key the way he did. Always with a caretaker—someone to keep an eye on her every move. And before you ask,” Teddy said, returning his attention to his Cobb salad, “it wasn’t mine—it happened when we were broken up. ”
Church was still trying to process this sudden turn of events. “Did you ever see her pregnant?” he asked.
Teddy shook his head. “The next time I saw her was at her birthday party,” he said. “And she obviously wasn’t pregnant then.”
Church shifted in his chair, his mind racing. “If the baby wasn’t yours, do you know who it belonged to?” he asked. “Who Saoirse was involved with?”
Teddy shrugged. “She wouldn’t say.”
“But the child,” Church said. “There would be hospital records, a birth certificate—”
“Not for a home birth,” Teddy said. “Not if they used a private doctor and paid him to keep his mouth shut.”
“But what happened to the baby?”
“I don’t know,” Teddy said. “Saoirse told me they planned to make her give it up. She didn’t know where or to whom. She was sick over the whole thing, that all this was happening to her and she didn’t have a choice.”
Church considered this. On the one hand, the story sounded preposterous.
A secret pregnancy, a secret child, that no one had breathed a word about for the past forty years?
But Church doubted Teddy would make something like that up.
It was too much of an over-the-top story for someone as sly as Teddy Mountbatten to bandy about, even if his intent was to throw suspicion back in the direction it had just come from, at the Towers family themselves.
“Is there anyone who can corroborate this?” Church asked.
Teddy shrugged. “The staff—anyone who was working there at the time would have known.”
Florence Talbot’s face flashed in Church’s mind.
She was working with the family when Saoirse disappeared.
But she seemed very protective of the Towers family, willing to keep their secrets.
If Church was going to find someone who had been working there and would willingly corroborate Saoirse’s pregnancy, he might have to look elsewhere.
“Why didn’t you come forward with any of this before?” Church asked.
“Saoirse told me all of this in confidence,” Teddy said.
“When she first disappeared, I thought she’d merely run off.
Maybe she’d found out where they’d sent the baby and she’d gone to find it.
Then, as more time went by and I never heard from her, my mind took a darker turn.
I thought maybe she hadn’t run off. Maybe they’d found a way to silence her forever.
And who would want to cross someone like that? ”
“You were afraid of her family?” Church asked.
Teddy set his fork down and finished chewing. He gave a wry smile. “Well, they aren’t just any family, are they?” Teddy said.
“No,” Church said. “No, I suppose they’re not.”
After they’d finished their lunch and Church had paid the bill, he leaned across the table toward Teddy.
“Can I ask you just one more thing?” he said. It had been nagging at him since they’d started their conversation. “Why talk to me at all?” Church asked. “‘Silence is the true friend that never betrays’ and all that?”
Teddy smiled. “I suppose either I am guilelessly innocent or I have some hubris myself that my good sense cannot cure me of.”