“Swanson. Swanson. What do we do? What can we do?”
“Have you paid her bail?” I asked by way of hello.
“Not yet,” Swanson informed me. “Look who’s up.”
“Why not?”
“We’re trying to make a game plan,” Ray said. “There’s Thai food on the way.”
“Are you not going to bail her out?” I asked. Ray avoided my gaze, took a sip of his wine.
“Bail is set at two million,” Swanson said.
“But can’t you get a bond, or like a—you don’t have to pay all that.”
“A bail bondsman would still need two hundred grand,” Swanson said.
Ray looked out the kitchen window in a frozen way, pretending to ignore our conversation. I realized he was embarrassed that he couldn’t pay.
“But I think the DA is going to charge the arson even if they don’t have the evidence, Ray,” Swanson started up again, touching his own face in a way that made me want to scream that he was going to give himself acne. “And arson is a serious charge.”
“If they look at that building close, they’re gonna find everything.”
“How bad is it?” Swanson asked. “I don’t want to know details, just give me an idea on a scale of one to ten.”
“Like, a seven? A six or a seven.”
I thought about what Bunny had told me about Ray stealing her identity, the credit card debt, the mortgage in her name, the bribed inspectors, the illegal fuse boxes. “I mean, I would say it’s a nine at least,” I said.
“Somewhere between a seven and a nine,” Ray said, and without breaking eye contact with Swanson he got out another glass and poured, shoved it in my direction.
“I mean, the police are going to investigate,” Swanson said. “There’s no question about that.”
“What if she copped to the murder charge?” Ray asked.
“What?”
“If she pled no contest on the second degree murder, do you think the DA would make the arson go away? I mean, if they charge her.”
Swanson shook his head. “It depends. I mean, without the arson, I would say they never intended to go to court on second degree murder, and they’re going to offer a plea bargain down to voluntary manslaughter. And they may still go down to voluntary manslaughter. But I’m not a criminal defense attorney, as I have told you many times. With the arson, it all depends how good their evidence is. I mean, if there’s video cam footage from the construction site or something, if they have her doing it, then they’re gonna have a lot of leverage. But it’s also true, she only set those panels on fire. There was no damage other than that, so we’re not talking about a conflagration here. And they were her property to begin with.”
“They found her clothes that smelled like gasoline,” I said.
“Not great,” Swanson said.
But Ray wasn’t having it. “There are no cameras down there, I never had cameras put in, there was no reason to. Ann Marie’s mother is up the DA’s ass about a murder charge, and he knows he can’t win if we go to court. You know he can’t win. No jury is going to convict a teenage girl of murder on what they have. My friend who’s a doctor, a fucking brain surgeon, told me it was a freak thing, that it was one in a million Ann Marie died from that bleed. I bet we could even cast doubt—you know, maybe it was medical malpractice. Maybe her case was mismanaged by the hospital.”
I did not believe this, but I tried to hold it in.
“It’s also true,” Swanson said, just rubbing and rubbing his greasy fingers over his cheek, “that juries don’t like arson. Lots of boring testimony from experts. They don’t understand it, and they don’t convict well. They’re not going to want this to go to trial, it’s too expensive for one thing. But it’s a lot, getting them to drop the arson and negotiating down to manslaughter. But second degree murder.”
“You can’t let her hang on the murder charge,” I said, finally exploding. “I mean, she’s your daughter!”
“No one’s letting her hang,” Ray said, angrier than I’d ever seen him. He took a step closer to me and his face was red-purple. He panted for a moment, glowering at me, then took a sip of his wine. “Better that she do six years for second degree murder than five years for voluntary manslaughter and five years for arson and meanwhile all our assets are seized and I