The new ebook edition of Prior Convictions is available at Amazon's Kindle Store, Apple's iTunes Store and Barnes & Noble's Nook Store.   This New York Times Notable Book of the Year was nominated for the mystery genre's top prizes, the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Anthony Award. Attorney Willa Jansson has spent the last year picking up the pieces after an epic hit to her résumé. In the L.A. office of a Wall Street firm, she's been buried under bankruptcy codes, mourning a love life that's back home with a stake in its heart. Now it's finally time to return to San Francisco. But Willa's mother is still furious about her corporate sell-out. Her despised ex insists she owes him an outrageous favor. And her new boss, a federal court judge, is already getting hate mail about her supposedly radical past. Are her family and oldest friends trying to sabotage her? If Willa can't figure out what's at stake for those closest to her, she may end up dying for a cause none of them believes in anymore.     Praise For Prior Convictions   "Almost every paragraph is eminently quotable... Matera writes brilliantly. If you're unfamiliar with this author, Prior Convictions is a dandy place to start." The Cleveland Plain Dealer "Readers will be shaken by Matera's rapier-sharp dissection of personal relationships and radical ideologies. Matera again demonstrates that she is one of today's best mystery writers." Publishers Weekly "Intelligent and entertaining... Absorbing... With sharp descriptions and crisp dialogue…admirably delivers the complex situations and memorable characters of a 'real novel' while still managing to let the detective story have its day in court." The Wall Street Journal "Here is a mystery with a distinctive voice, sharp wit, discussion of social and moral issues, insight into personal ideals and compromises and characters that grab your emotions." Washington Post Willa Jansson is an unusually deep and complex character for crime fiction—tough-minded, sexual, vulnerable, lonely, morally alive… Prior Convictions is gutsy, grown-up crime-writing from one of the best practitioners around. It's hard to imagine Matera won't soon have the huge audience she deserves." Newsday "Matera's wit, grace with language, irreverence toward the legal system, and wry dissection of being a child of the Sixties make this a standout… If you want to catch an author on the verge of best-sellerdom, read this." Kirkus Reviews "Lia Matera is a mystery writer with something to say and a fascinating way of saying it… Prior Convictions is an intense story of personal relationships and an exciting mystery." Richmond Times-Dispatch "What cinches the book is that Matera seems to really understand the moral and social issues that were on the deck in the late '60s and early '70s, and she's not interested in blowing them off. She's smart enough to realize that many of these issues are still with us… Good stuff." Austin Chronicle "Matera's language is witty and sharp; her images by turn humorous and poignant. The moral dilemmas with which her characters wrestle are real and wrenching. And the mystery itself is shrewd. Prior Convictions is a superb psychological thriller." The Recorder     Prior Convictions   By Lia Matera       Copyright 1991 Lia Matera   Electronic Edition 2011 eISBN 978-1-937697-04-4     This ebook may not be re-sold, reproduced, copied or distributed for commercial or non-commercial use.   First Simon & Schuster Books Edition 1991 First Ballantine Books Edition 1992       The law firms and organizations in this book are imaginary. So are the lawyers and other characters. Any resemblance they bear to actual individuals or organizations is coincidental.     Author's Note   This book differs in some ways from the print version, published by Simon & Schuster in 1991 and reprinted by Ballantine in 1992. In that edition, I sometimes used specific dates and events to highlight the passage of time. Two decades later, it seems simpler to express this as years in the interim. I also removed or reworked some references and added others.         Prior Convictions     The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. —William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"       Prologue     Tom Rugieri, after all these years. I remember you at antiwar rallies, your fist raised, your chest heaving so it strained your shirt. Even in public, I could hardly keep my hands off you.  Did prison change you? "They'll get us all soon enough,'' some boy on a makeshift platform would shout. And the crowd would cheer even before he added, "Stand up to them on April seventeenth," or December 18, or whenever the next demonstration was. "Show them you're not afraid. They can't arrest us all." But I was afraid. When the National Guard ringed our Boston College rallies, when police in riot gear spilled from convoys of trucks, I wanted to run. I couldn't, because our country was incinerating children under tons of bombs. That part doesn't get much ink in history books, but that's how we saw it. That's why I couldn't back away. That's why I hid my fear. I would march with my friends, Tom's friends, and let myself get separated from them. I would lag to the back of the crowd. While others focused on the speakers, the music, the chanting, I was all paranoid eyes, scanning, watching, ready to run. Sometimes there was tear gas, sometimes fire hoses or even rubber bullets. People we knew were hauled away. Later they showed us their bruises and stitches. The ones who fought the police got jail time. Not all would talk about what happened to them there. We marched to free them. I screamed along with everyone else, screamed that we would never back down. I repeated after people who really meant it. But I knew I was just a mouse hiding in a lion's mane. Tom meant it. "This is the only thing they understand, Crystal." He weighed a rock in his big square hand. He shouldn't have said it in front of his mother. She laced her fingers through his thick black curls and pulled until he clamped his hand around her heavy wrist. "Bestia!" beast, I'll hear her scream until the day I die. Then she made a fist of her other hand and hammered on his chest, his face. "You trying to kill me, bestia." "You know you can't bow to fascists. You saw it for yourself." He caught her other wrist, forced her to stand back, frowned at her until she broke free to wrap her short arms around his neck. His sister burst through the kitchen door, her thick black brows drawn together in outrage, her lips pulled away from her teeth. "Leave her alone!" she shrieked. "You're an animal!" And me, my heart racing, watching the contours of Tom's body. Imagining the thick lawn of body hair, the massive rib cage under my greedy fingers. His collective disapproved of me. They accused Tom of "waning commitment." They said he'd built a wall around us and forgotten the work that had to be done. He got furious and said he was entitled to a personal relationship. They said maybe if the relationship were an equal partnership with an "aware and liberated individual dedicated to the struggle." Tom leaped out of his chair when they said that. "My personal life is private—it is not policy, it is not strategy, it is not open to discussion." There was a long silence, and someone pulled out a copy of the Highway 61's The Fire Now. Tom knocked it out of her hand. There's a part in it about monogamy holding up the corporate structure. Being challenged made Tom stubborn. That night he moved me out of the dorms and into his apartment. That's probably when I got pregnant. I lost track of my pills. I would have married Tom anyway. His mother Santina's heart was broken by our living together. And somehow, her heart was important to me, a fragile bloom on an old prickly pear. More important to me than my own mother's feelings. My parents, I knew, would threaten to disown me, the suburbanites' meager arsenal. But to me, my mother was a cold, powdered cheek, father's slender socialite. Santina was special, vibrant, extravagantly unapologetically foreign. The ferocity of her embrace when I told her I would become Tom's wife, the way she said, "I know you no was one of those cheap puttane," it added something to my small store of self-worth. When old friends found out, they were disgusted. "In your teens? Like some preggers high school girl?" New friends recoiled as if marriage were a visible cancer, a malformed lump squeezing Tom out of their lives. But I could see that small hasty wedding made a difference to him. I wasn't sure why, but that day there was pride, or something, in his eyes. He made jokes when Santina alternately wept onto my neck, her coarse hair rough against my chin, and toasted me with anisetto. But he kept kissing her cheeks, flushed and damp above her gap-toothed smile. As if together, they'd managed a coup. After that, Santina counseled me continually. She'd thought of a dozen ways to keep Tom from going too far. He was too much like her Uncle Corrado, a partisan in the war. Corrado wouldn't listen to his mother, no. A man like that listens only to his wife. "Now you marry, you tell him Tomasino he stop breaking a law." That was her favorite fantasy. And law school. "Luigi the grocer boy he go. Now he's change a world, like Tomasino want. But with the law." Tom had been arrested a few times by then. I thanked God he was released by overburdened prosecutors. But he was furious they didn't take him or the movement seriously. He quoted Thoreau in jail, "Why are you not here?" Santina exploded with rage when he said that. As a child, she'd watched her father and three uncles dragged off to war. All four died there. Then her Uncle Corrado, a partisan, ran off to the hills. He was captured and shot "like a bandit." And the youngest, too young to fight, was blown to pieces racing across a piazza while his sisters and their young children (including Santina) looked on from the balcony of a friend's apartment. "They say I too small and no remember, but I remember. I look up in a sky,'' Santina told me more than once, "and see the airplane. Next thing Zu Francuccio and all a Piazza Giulia is a big boom and fire and dust. The dust.'' She'd cover half her olive face with a fat ringless hand. "Like the smoke in hell. Next day Mamma she hear from a compare… my papà he's dead." She went to Mass every morning "to say to God that's enough, from my family. You did take Papà and all five my uncle. Now you leave alone my son." God had taken her house in Italy, too. Because of her uncle the partisan, they torched the family home. The soldiers didn't let the women and children take anything out with them. "And never anymore we have money. All women. Where we can get money, eh? I live like a slave twenty years, do anything for anybody, and then finally I can come here in America. Come for my Tomasino. So maybe someday he is a big shot." And she'd conclude the story as she concluded all of them, by wiping away tears and dragging her wooden spoon along the sides of the big pot of spaghetti sauce perennially bubbling on the stove. When Tom got arrested on a major charge, a felony charge, I begged him to see a regular lawyer. Not the one he wanted, a man who cared foremost about politics, about "re-educating" the jury. "I haven't done anything wrong, Crystal, and I don't need a goddam apologist, fucking sellout kind of a lawyer.'' His black eyes glittered warning: end of discussion. It was torture waiting for a trial that could take him away from me for years. I was helpless to convince him to help himself. I ruined nights I should have cherished, trying to persuade him. Every day the trial came closer, it felt like a knife pushed in deeper. I guess I needed something then—sympathy, diversion. I met another man. In an Italian literature course I'd taken to please Santina, though she had no interest whatever in my studies, and was illiterate herself. His name was Edward Hershey. He was tall and slim, long-legged, with a serious face and green eyes. He was very male, but softer than Tom, kinder maybe, certainly more yielding. One day he was a friend, and then his girlfriend left town. Our attraction got too strong. I needed Tom in such a crazy way, a burning way. I needed his fire, his foreignness, how different he was from me. But I understood Edward. He was like me, mayonnaise on white bread and fighting it. He was easy to talk to; we could rely on common references and emotional shorthand. For a few amazing weeks, I made love to both of them. That was a long time ago. I was celibate for years after that. When Tom found out about me and Edward, he went berserk and broke my arm. I guess he'd been suspicious for a while. Sometimes he'd insist I stay in. He'd pin me to the wall with his big body. "You're my wife, let's act married." The night he found out about Edward, I'd gotten carried away. Kissing Edward under a streetlight, I heard myself say, I love you. It scared me, scared Edward, too, I think. He didn't reply. Maybe someone saw us walking across campus together. Maybe Tom saw us. He wasn't at his collective, like I thought. He was home before me. Before I climbed the last flight to what we called our "cottage," he opened the door. I knew from the look on his face. Fear took my breath away. I tried to slip past him and find something in that small tenement apartment, something I could do to keep from fidgeting. Tom grabbed my wrist, jerking my arm till I heard the bone snap. My God, it hurt. The fear choked me and froze me in place, like in a nightmare. I remember looking up at him, shielding myself with my other arm, trying to protect myself. I felt crushed, as if the hatred in his eyes had mass. I watched his huge arm pull back and snap forward like a spring. I was too shocked to scream, I couldn't push a sound through my trachea. I took the beating without a whimper. While Tom said things in Italian. Italian! Santina told me once about a dressmaker in her village. Her husband had gone to Germany to work, like so many other unemployed southern Italians. The dressmaker was young and beautiful by village standards and, as the lonely years went by, she took a lover. And somebody, a paisano passing through Germany, told her husband. He immediately hopped on a train. He sneaked back into the village in the dead of night and disfigured his wife with a straight razor while the entire village listened to her screams of agony and terror. Then he disrobed her and marched her from house to house denouncing her as an adulteress. "For days his mamma she keep a calling everybody to her house and say, 'Come and see the puttana,' and her, poverella, on a bed nuda crying, her face and chest…" Santina implied the slash marks with her finger. The husband searched for his wife's lover for days to kill him, but the lover had jumped a boat to America. The husband went back to Germany and never sent his wife another penny. "She did go become a prostituta in Roma," Santina continued gravely. Family honor, she explained. The husband had no choice. I'd always thought of Tom as an American with an Italian mother. I was wrong. Tom wouldn't speak to me after that. I heard our women friends hassled him, heckled him at meetings. He stopped going. By the time I was able to search for him, he'd dropped out of sight. He missed his trial date. I was desperate, spent all my money on detectives, newspaper ads. I was four months pregnant by then, wider but not really showing. His mother slammed the door in my face. "Puttana," whore, was all she'd say. "No divorce!" She left me standing there sobbing, my arm encased in plaster, wondering how, after all the stories over pasta, all the agonizing over Tom's future, she could think I'd come to ask for a divorce. Tom's sister dashed out after me. Her heavy-featured face was flushed. She looked angry, as always. I thought she meant to spit at me, and I cringed. Instead she put her arms around me and said the most terrible things about Tom that I have ever heard anyone say about another person. I backed out of her arms. Her embrace had hurt me. She was squinting, sneering. I felt nauseous. She told me Tom had joined Highway 61, a radical group that kept urging us to blow up government buildings. I stayed with Edward until some things happened that made it impossible. Then I had to slink home to my parents. They took one look at my arm (the other marks were gone by then) and speculated that I'd brought it on myself. "Not one of us"—that was their assessment of Tom. One of "us" would never do something like that. They'd sit in front of their television watching footage of the war, villages exploding and bloody children weeping, and tell me that Mediterranean people were violent by nature. In softer moments, my mother would mention that her brother the California lawyer could have kept Tom out of prison… if he'd been civilized enough to deserve it. They weren't worth arguing with. I didn't have the energy. I did what I was used to doing: I coexisted with them. Maybe that's my pattern. I did it later with my second husband. Only with Tom did I stretch and struggle. I got in touch with Highway 61 (from an old Bob Dylan song—God tells Abraham to kill his son there). I didn't say I was looking for Tom, and I gave my mother's maiden name so he wouldn't blackball me if he heard I was trying to join. It was two months before they trusted me enough to let me meet with anyone important. I helped them any way I could, hoping I'd see Tom. I made coffee. I made booby traps. I made myself believe in it. Living with my parents made class hatred easy. Then I made the biggest mistake of my life. I told one of the Highwaypeople that my parents were leaving for Europe, that I'd have their big house to myself all summer. If, on the Fourth of July, I hadn't had to go to the hospital to have a miscarriage, I'd have ended up a prisoner in that house. The other prisoner there, an innocent baby, would probably have been murdered. And my husband might not have spent all these years in prison. Soon I'll see my Tom again. A free man. I just hope he doesn't see me.     Chapter One     I watched my marijuana float away from the Santa Monica pier. At the last minute, an eddy of gray water sent it swirling back toward me. It seemed to call out, Willa, no; I'm your last vestige of hipness. I almost jumped into the water to reclaim the damp detritus of my one remaining vice. My one remaining vice—god, I'd gotten boring. But I thought of all the mornings I'd wakened feeling like a bad country-western song. Every morning for the last year. And many mornings for many years before that. I'd been smoking pot since I was thirteen, in fact. Since a cute boy with an earring handed me a joint on Haight Street, near my parents' flat. I had enough undamaged left brain to realize (if not exactly comprehend) how very many years ago that was. I'd accomplished a lot in spite of it, and in spite of gypsying around after high school. And there was that brief detour into jail, too. But several years later than most of my peers, I'd endured Stanford University, Malhousie Law School, and two legal associate jobs—one politically correct, one fiscally correct. Maybe I'd needed pot to help me put up with the bullshit. It worried me, though, that I needed it every single day. Anyway, I reminded myself, this was a good time to quit. I was embarking on a (slightly premature) midlife crisis. I'd just left the best job—rather, the best income—I'd ever had. My sex life was lying somewhere with a wooden stake in its heart. My mood was beyond repair; I might as well give my brain cells a chance to regenerate. Behind me on the pier, an Iranian couple noisily unfolded a quilted-steel hot dog wagon. Early rollerbladers strapped on knee pads. A Vietnamese man with an armload of buckets baited fish hooks. I shook the last few flakes of pot out of my baggie and watched them sift through a layer of yellow smog. Then, more discreetly, I dropped the baggie off the pier. In Santa Monica, I'd get more jail time for littering than for possession of a controlled substance. I walked the length of the wharf, brushing the last of the green dust off my fingers. Santa Monica, the Miami Beach of sold-out activists: Fitting I should dump my pot here. I was dull and unhip now, one more straight person in unchic retro—faded jeans, moccasins and a tie-dyed T-shirt. (At least my hair wasn't long and center-parted. It was shoulder length and side-parted, the only style that looks vaguely adult on a five-one blonde who won't wear makeup and hates high heels.) Smoking pot in grumpy solitude had been my alternative to sushi bars and health clubs with lawyers I saw enough of at work. Pot was my own little party, the last flicker of an old light show. Alas. I took a final, unfond look at the motels and bungalow restaurants of Santa Monica Boulevard. Then I climbed into my car, a hatchback filled with all my worldly possessions, mostly plastic hanging bags of clothes. A year at a top-dollar L.A. law firm had done wonders for my wardrobe. A few more months and I'd have been the best-dressed lawyer at the Betty Ford Clinic. I started the car, feeling clammy and nervous. I'd lived most of my life in San Francisco, where you can get anywhere by bus, streetcar or BART. I'd never learned to drive. But by the time I'd subsidized a fleet of L.A. cabs, I decided I was flexible enough to learn. Today, I had hundreds of miles to go before nightfall. I was finally leaving. I'd made 346 chalk marks on the walls of my Westwood apartment (stucco, of course; wall-to-wall carpeting; utterly characterless and bland, as I was fast becoming). I'd served my time. My résumé had been paroled. Leaving was the good news. The bad news would fill several volumes. Yes, I'd rehabilitated my résumé. It had taken a year of squinting at loan agreements and conferring with obnoxious men in bright power ties, but I'd done it. I was now marketable—a fourth-year attorney with corporate law and litigation experience. I was experienced enough to be of use but not senior enough to threaten associates on the brink of partnership. I'd have no trouble finding a job in another firm. Unfortunately, I hated being a lawyer. And yes, I was going home to San Francisco. I loved the city, missed it like hell. I'd fretted myself into a tizzy when an earthquake hit and I wasn't there to panic and get in everybody's way. When a quake shook L.A., on the other hand, all I did was daydream about fissures swallowing my office building. I hadn't moved, I'd only left. I knew I should be anxious to get back. But I hadn't settled things with my parents, the original bleeding-heart activists. (My earliest childhood fantasy was not my name on a Broadway marquee. It was "Free Willa Jansson" on a mimeographed flyer.) My parents were still mad at me for taking a socially useless job. I was still mad at them for being mad at me. I was also fighting a stupid feeling that might have passed for love if its object had ever given me a chance to express it. But I hadn't heard from Don Surgelato the entire year I'd been away. And when, in desperation, I'd found a therapist to help me with my problems, I'd clowned things up by falling for him, too. (He called it transference, which sounds more respectable than lust. Also, it's legal to accept payment for it.) So I was on my way back to San Francisco, but I didn't really want to get there. I was finally marketable, but I didn't want a job in my field. And in terms of swinging nightlife, I might as well be a Mormon. My therapist thought I should stay in Los Angeles, stay with Wailes Roth Fotheringham & Beck, until I got a handle on my other problems. Instead, I accepted an unexpected job offer. Starting Monday, I'd be clerking for the Honorable Michael J. Shanna, federal court judge, Northern District of California. Clerkships are usually reserved for baby Republicans fresh out of law school. I'd applied for and talked my way into this one at the urging of an old friend and former employer. I'd done it because clerkships only last a year. Any firm I joined now would want a career-long commitment, and I couldn't do that. I wasn't sure I had even a year of discipline left in me. I wasn't sure I could stand even a low-key stint writing bench memos for a judge. But it was a respectably finite job with some résumé value, and it was an excuse to leave L.A. I grabbed it. My therapist seemed troubled, in his pointedly non-judgmental way. I pictured him in his rattan chair, looking ready for the big screen—laser beam eyes, tousled hair, raw silk shirt setting off a surfer's tan. He suggested I "let go of the idea" of making career or life decisions now. He suggested I "float a while longer," avoid making even the right changes for the wrong reasons. And maybe he had a point. Maybe I should have stayed in L.A. Whatever else was wrong with the place, somebody there was willing (for a hundred and thirty dollars an hour) to listen to my problems without comparing them to those of third-world mothers. But I never seem to take the advice of people I respect. I take my own, instead. So I drove up the coast highway, oblivious to crashing waves, kiting pelicans, cliffs painted in ice plant. The price of admission to a midlife crisis is that you stop noticing anything that won't sleep with you.     Chapter Two     I was running late, so I drove directly to my parents' flat. My father had phoned that morning to ask me to dinner. He said he wanted to try out a new recipe called Buddha's Feast. I said sure, I'd bring the barbecue sauce. I climbed out of my car feeling like a clenched fist. In nine hours, my back had never touched the seat. I don't know what keeps my car on the road, and until I find out, I'm assuming it's the force of my grip on the wheel. My parents live in the Haight, on a block that looks like a retrospective of urban housing trends—everything from domes and turrets to flat, unornamented plaster. The jumble of shared-wall styles made an Emerald City silhouette against a moonlit sky. I stood there a minute, drinking it in, glad to be back. The evening air was crisp, blessedly free of the slight, ever-present humidity of L.A. haze. I could smell black bean sauce and garlic coming from my parents' flat. My father believes spices can improve the flavor of tofu. Probably they could, if tofu had a flavor. "Willa Jansson." Oh, god. I tried not to recognize the voice. It couldn't be. Fate could not be so capricious and malign. But there he stood, ten yards from my parents' porch steps, arm outstretched. Edward Hershey, in denim and Frye boots, six-feet-two of painful memories. "What are you doing here?" he said. "My parents." I waved at a narrow Victorian in need of paint. "What are you doing here?" "Visiting someone." He stood in arrested motion: portrait of a man under a streetlamp. Behind him, ornamented cornices caught the light like a picture frame. "You're back in the city now?" How did he know I'd been gone? "I start clerking for a judge next Monday. Federal court." It was a few seconds before Edward spoke. Giving me a chance to appreciate his clipped curls and broad shoulders? "Willa, have you ever wished for something and had it, bam, happen?" "You wished you'd run into me on a dark street?'' I thought of all the years I'd wanted to use his zipper for target practice. "I wished I knew a lawyer who owed me a favor." "Owed you a favor?" I didn't have to add, you son of a bitch. A couple of years ago I learned Edward Hershey was a detective, and I asked him to trace some letters for me. He'd done a good job; big deal. Balance that against almost twenty years of detesting him for screwing up my love life. No way I owed him anything but another punch in the nose. (I hadn't reacted well to the news that he'd given me a virus then considered more repellent than leprosy.) He grinned. "You look great. Really fantastic." I looked like I'd spent a lovesick year working seventy hours a week and smoking too much pot the rest of the time. My skin was so white you could see veins in my arms and blue capillaries under my eyes. I looked like an axolotl. But I was thin, and I was blond; that's all Hershey ever cared about. Hershey and a lot of other jokers. I have yet to think of a way to make my face look cranky and disparaging. And I get so tired of people being unpleasantly surprised. Anyway, if Hershey was waiting for me to return the compliment, it was too bad. Of course he looked good—what else was new? But he wasn't going to hear it from me. He'd heard enough of my rhapsodizing the year I moved to Boston. I'd gone there straight out of alternative high school. Some people convinced me that Boston was on the brink of becoming a socialist city-state, and I was all set to help turn it into utopia. Which shows I hadn't yet met anyone from Massachusetts. I was too naïve to resist Edward Hershey when he strolled into the Peace-Action House (also known as a roach-infested Cambridge apartment) where I was working. "Why do you need a lawyer who owes you a favor? Not,'' I emphasized, "that I am she." "'I am she,'" he repeated. "You educated thing." Hershey stepped closer, remembered the streetlamp, then stepped back into the pool of light. He looked at me as if I mattered to him. Since I knew I didn't, I was safe from The Look. "How ya been, Willa? I've been thinking about you a lot lately." How gratifying. I thought it, didn't say it. A year of conferring with obnoxious men in three thousand dollar suits had honed my silent sarcasm. "What have you been thinking?" He favored me with his patented sexy squint, making me regret the question. Making me regret a lot of things. Edward Hershey strolled into my life back when sex was simple. It felt good so we did it. Sure, most people had minimum standards based on looks. Mine had more to do with politics, and also, I refused to sleep with anyone corny. At the time, this was devastating to my sex life as the virus I later picked up from Hershey. I thought I was lucky to find him: he was never corny. Be careful what you wish for. He positioned himself more carefully, allowing the streetlamp to bathe his face in light. Square, craggy, intense—he looked like a character actor playing the star's less-handsome brother. "Just wondering if you got that mess cleared up," he said. The San Francisco branch of Wailes Roth had disintegrated. Three lawyers quit, two died, one went to prison. "I was down in L.A., the L.A. office. For a year. For my résumé." I pressed closer to my car. Three hundred and forty-six chalk marks on the wall. I remembered how it felt when there were only six, sixty, a hundred. "So where you staying now? Around here?" "I sublet my old place. My tenant was supposed to be out yesterday.'' "You just got back?'' "Just now." I gestured at my hatchback. "This really is kismet." Edward reached out, giving my arm a squeeze. "Running into you. I can't get over it." I jerked my arm away. I'd be his kismet only if I held a butcher knife and he fell on it. "I know someone who's in trouble, who needs a lawyer desperately, not a Santa Cruz lawyer—I'm still down in S'Cruz—it can't be a local person. And it's got to be someone I can trust." I had to laugh. Edward Hershey thinking he could trust me. Eight months after I met Edward, I left Boston. I left to attend a trial in San Francisco—my parents' trial. They were looking at four to ten years for "destruction" of government property, a few hammer taps on missile nose cones. (Or was that a different time, a different trial? I couldn't keep all their arrests straight anymore.). The day after I got home, I took part in a demonstration at the Presidio. I was arrested. I hired my parents' lawyer, Julian Warneke, to represent me. My parents walked away with no jail time. I got two nightmarish months in the San Bruno jail. I wrote to Edward, begging him to come west. When he arrived, I was just out of jail, still crying for no reason and waking up in a cold sweat. Hershey knew he'd contracted herpes, but he (says he) thought it was inactive. He didn't want to spoil our romantic reunion. What he really meant was, he didn't want to mention he'd cheated on me. I punched him as hard as I could when I found out. I made a big, ugly scene in Washington Square near Peter and Paul's Cathedral. I like to think I'd have killed him if a nun hadn't intervened. When I saw him years later at Julian Warneke's wake, I was still furious. My mother had been entreating me for ages to "let go of my anger." She's big on letting go of anger unless it's directed at your government. And I did eventually let go of enough anger to have Hershey trace some letters for me. I'd let go of enough anger to stand here now and pose no threat to him. But do him a favor? I was about to say, "Fat fucking chance," when a squeaky voice called out, "Willa! And Edward Hershey—my goodness. How nice."     Chapter Three     Mother wore a red blouse with puckered seams. A grateful Salvadoran woman (a refugee Mother helped to evade immigration) had sewn it for her. It brought out the rosiness of her cheeks and set off the pale yellow-gray of her hair. She wore it with a Guatemalan skirt of parading women carrying urns. She sat along an archipelago of floor cushions, legs crossed under her skirt so its pattern made her seem ringed by Lilliputians. My father lounged beside her in an ancient apron I'd decaled with the motto "Love Tofu—Don't Eat It." He looked wispy, colorless, thin. It made me feel parental, made me want to force-feed him pork. His face pleated into a grin whenever our eyes met. Behind them, a jumble of tacked-up posters, announcements and paper icons suggested the wall of a bus stop. I scanned them, noticing their focus had shifted from saving El Salvador and Nicaragua to feeding San Francisco's homeless and bleaching addicts' needles. I was on one end of a cushionless slingback sofa, as far from Edward Hershey as possible. I didn't want to share the couch with him. I didn't want to share my parents, my reunion or even my airspace. Damn him. Damn Mother for inviting him in. In the room's one comfortable chair was Clement Kerrey, family friend and one of my few surviving former employers. Right out of law school, I'd worked for Clement and his law partner Julian Warneke. Now Clement taught at my alma mater, Malhousie Law. It was Clement who'd put me in touch with Judge Shanna—partly so I could return to the city, and partly so I could reachieve political correctness. I hadn't seen him in a year and a half, so I was startled by his appearance. His steel-gray hair and clipped beard were streaked with white. Lines of tension had been erased from his forehead, and his eyes had lost their manic glitter. There was a fluorescent-light paleness to his skin, a stoop to his posture. He no longer looked like an endlessly energetic labor lawyer rushing to enjoin unfair labor practices. He looked like an aging law professor with plenty of time to read his bluebooks. Which was, I realized, exactly what he'd become. It made me wonder about my closetful of new suits and my tidy new haircut: Did I look like just another precious lawyer? There were rows of matted photographs on the wall behind him, artistic black-and-whites of working people—gifts from Clement, photos he'd taken of his clients. He broke the ice. "What a treat! To see old friends again. What a lot of good memories." Bad ones, too, if he'd been the type to dwell on them. "I was just talking about you today, Willa. To Harry Prough, that old rascal." Harry Prough became a left-wing lawyer titan when he defended the radical group Highway 61. He'd been jailed almost four years for contempt of court because of that trial. "Talking about me?" I'd followed Prough's career with interest. I'd lived in Boston right before the big Highway 61 trial. And I'd seen him argue some of their earlier, lesser ones. I'd been thrilled to meet him years later at Julian Warneke's house, but I doubted he remembered me. "Mmm." Clement grinned, some of the glitter back in his eyes. "He's arguing a motion before Mike Shanna next week. I told him to look for you." From the corner of my eye, I saw Mother jerk back, her pale hand fluttering to her lips. My father took the hand firmly in his own and brought it back down to the cushion. "Highway 61," he murmured. "Interesting case." "Idiots. We all were." I was a little surprised to hear myself say so, wasn't even sure what I meant by it. "The movement, you mean? To be seduced by the general militarism of the era?" Clement leaned forward, wrapping his arms around a thin knee. "Yes." Edward Hershey spoke for me, damn him. "They mow us down—baton us, beat us up—and instead of rejecting their—" "They did worse than that," Mother chimed in. "If you think back to Chicago, Kent State." "That's the trouble," Hershey said. "We were like Revolutionary War reenactors. Only for us it was those 'whole world is watching' protests. It was play-acting. We were soldiers in the quote-unquote war at home. The revolution. People got off on it, the rush. Pretending they were guerillas." He sounded as cynical as I am, which momentarily endeared him to me. Clement shook his head vehemently. "No, don't minimize it. It wasn't a revolution. But without some opening skirmishes, it was impossible to know that. How do you know what a thing might become? If you're too cautious, you risk losing the moment. And sometimes there's a chance of doing something transformative. If you try, at the very least you find out it's too soon. So then you fall back and marshal your support. Learn your lessons and next time maybe people don't shrug and turn away. For better or worse—worse, I suppose, in this case—Highway 61 showed us where we stood. And what happened to Harry Prough, it pushed us to find new roads." "Highway 61? You shouldn't have to try that bullshit to know it won't work." Was Hershey talking through clenched teeth? What pushed his buttons? "Kidnapping a baby? That was a disgrace. And Prough should never have—" "Prough didn't defend the kidnappers—don't forget that. His clients were charged with conspiracy. A bogus charge. None of the evidence supported it. The fact that they were convicted anyway, that's what tells the tale. That and Prough's sentence." Harry Prough had gotten four years for contempt of court. Multiple counts of simple contempt. The conspiracy trial judge had been a real fascist, worse than the one who tried the kidnapping case. "Yeah, I know. But even so, the conspirators were dicks," Hershey said. "I know it's not illegal to make the rest of a movement look bad, but…" Highway 61 had kidnapped a corporate vice president's baby, threatening to burn it alive in retaliation for the company's manufacture of incendiary bombs. What got the supposed conspirators convicted was their refusal to express pity for the baby or his parents. They'd taken the stand, one by one, to jeer at the vice president. To say his chemicals had curled the skin off other people's infants, to demand he explain why his deserved better. "Well, yes. There's no law against being outrageous," Clement said. "Or wrong. An honorable judge would have made the jurors understand that. And Harry Prough, well… I won't defend him for encouraging his clients to be self-indulgent. But in terms of the politics, look at the bigger picture. Over my lifetime the Left has made some of our worst horrors—segregation, Vietnam—so divisive that they became too expensive. Unsustainably so. In that context, there's room for everyone from theorists to terrorists." Clement Kerrey, apologist for baby-kidnappers. My father smoothed his apron. "If we're going to do a cost-benefit analysis, though, Clement... The terrorist parts of a continuum get a disproportionate amount of attention. That makes a tougher row to hoe for everyone else. Maybe if the Weathermen hadn't smashed the SDS, we'd have had an apparatus for social change when—" "Hooey," Mother interjected. "The SDS was too incremental, too liberal." Definitely an epithet. "Helping people petition for neighborhood stoplights! Stoplights! You don't change the system one intersection at a time." If she started talking general strike again, I'd scream. I heard myself say, "Everyone thinks they can change the system. It's ego." It just came out, the proverbial rude noise in church. "How many years since the Highway 61 trial? Look around. Does anybody still own The Fire Now?" I saw Mother glance toward the bookshelf. "Things have gone backwards. Corporations have more power now than they did then." I should know. I'd spent the last year in their thrall. "I would have to disagree strongly," Clement said. As if in keeping with the strength of his disagreement, he squeezed his leg harder. "The benefits of working for social justice are diffuse, that's all. But even the Highway 61 trials pulled some things in the right direction. You remember the witness, the girl whose house was used to hide the child?" He stared at some spot behind me as if reading a teleprompter. "How disturbing it was that they closed the courtroom for her testimony?" "Had to close it," Edward cut in. His skin was flushed and his brows were lowered. "Look who she was testifying against.'' "If it happened today," Clement's tone was a little chilly, "her going into witness protection would have sufficed. Closing the doors completely gave the judge too much unimpeded—and unobserved—latitude. We had to wait four years to hear about Prough's speech, for example. He had to get out and sue to make the transcript public." The judge's gavel hammering to shut him up, Harry Prough had delivered a passionate and now-famous indictment of the judiciary in general and that judge in particular. Which might explain why the kidnappers ended up with lighter sentences than Highway 61 "conspirators" not in on the plan. My father shook his head. "Willa, you say we can't change the system. And maybe right now it's harder than ever. But it's a dialectic—you can see that. We're on the downswing at the moment but—" "You'd change things if you could, Willa." Clement sounded a little desperate. "You'd help if you knew what to do." He couldn't be asking if I still felt pity for displaced refugees and migrant farm workers? I scanned the row of pictures behind him—men loading boxes, families picking tomatoes, women canning shrimp. I thought of the old union organizing song, Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on? "Karma yoga," Clement continued. "Maybe it doesn't make sense to hit the streets in some political climates—" Mother piped her outrage. "Why do you say that?" "—but we can always speak through our work." I could feel four pairs of eyes on me. When I'd taken the Wailes Roth job, Mother had punched all my carefully programmed buttons, recited the radical catechism, watered me with a mother's tears. Still my knee had refused to jerk. Maybe if I told them how much I'd hated the job—that it was like being slowly smothered in bankruptcy codes, that my coworkers had all the élan of well-dressed snakes—it would partially restore their faith in me. Maybe if I made a point of saying again that the firm represented banks and corporations in their byzantine dealings with other banks and corporations; that my six figure salary had been relatively untainted (even supposing my morals were worth that sum). That big firms like Wailes Roth didn't dirty their shoes by stepping on little people; there just wasn't enough money in it. I looked at my parents, thought about their years in the Peace Corps, their seventeen arrests and eleven convictions (was it?), their low-on-the-food-chain diet. And sighed. "We're canceled out," I said. "You guys don't see it because you hang around with other people just like us. But everyone else eats Brazilian beef from cleared rain forests. If they've got jobs manufacturing weapons or poisons, they just feel lucky to have a job. They don't care—" "So we shouldn't, either?" Hershey said. Mr. fucking Activism. A two-bit detective, a civil litigation whore. "My point is, what's the use of just doing something? If it doesn't accomplish anything? If it doesn't make a dent?" "How do we know what succeeds except by trying things that don't?" my father said quietly. As if, after billing two thousand hours, I had energy to fritter away on long shots. "It's just so easy to believe you're effecting change when everyone around you agrees. Then you go out into the real world…" I absentmindedly fingered a library book beside me on the couch. A biography of Mr. Compromise himself, Hubert Humphrey. "Your father's reading it." Mother hmphed. She tolerated Daddy's open-mindedness as another wife might tolerate philandering. "Such a chip-on-the-shoulder book. Those half-a-loaf liberals are ashamed of themselves, that's all, for what they didn't do in the sixties and seventies." "And radicals are ashamed of what they did do," I added. My mother shot me a look. I stifled a sudden urge to flee. I'm probably not the first woman to react that way to half an hour of her parents' company. On the other hand, it was a luxury to talk politics. In L.A., people discussed their possessions, not their beliefs. "So how was your drive up?" My father's slide into small talk was forced, at best. I gave them the guidebook rap on Big Sur and Seventeen Mile Drive. I didn't actually remember much except cars honking at my cowardly pace. Throughout my monologue, Clement scowled and tapped his foot, possibly rehashing the prior conversation. Mother's lips had pursed into a knoll of wrinkles. She's the kind of chalk-skinned blonde whose skin withers like dried fruit. I supposed mine would, too, by and by. My father kept glancing at her, his pale blue eyes brimming with warning and worry. When he finally got her attention, he raised his chin slightly. She raised hers, too. Damn: their take-us-away-we're-ready look. No one spoke when I concluded. Finally, I asked my dad, "Have you seen Lissa?" He winced, a defeated droop to his bony shoulders. He'd followed my train of thought, I'm afraid. (He always had: condoms on my thirteenth birthday, a briefcase—with a hookah inside—on my thirtieth.) Lissa had been my teacher at the Haight Street Alternative School. I'd been shuttled to her place every time my parents were arrested. I'd wave away clouds of incense and listen to her gush about how committed and noble they were. Other kids read The Wind in the Willows, I got Civil Disobedience; other kids watched sit-coms, I got Harvest of Shame. Patty Hearst never got so brainwashed. "Lissa's still hanging on," my father said. "She's had to shift her focus a little—children's dance as a way of… well, I'm not clear on that. But she's still there. Renamed the school, something about dance for the people, the dance revolution." "Fox Trotsky? Tiananmen Square Dancing?" Admittedly this was dumb babble. But I was surprised to see Mother look so annoyed. If anyone was used to my lame puns... I watched her lock eyes with my father. Her expression changed. If I hadn't known her so well, I'd have said she looked apprehensive. And that was something I rarely saw. No matter how many times the cops dragged her off, for example, she never seemed to dread it, she always rode bravely to the guillotine. "Are you guys okay?" I hated to ask in front of Hershey. It felt unprivate, invaded. Why the hell did he have to be here? My father's forehead puckered, then smoothed back out. He stood. "Not if we don't eat soon. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm starved." Mother continued blinking at him, her face soft with indecision. Finally she stood, too. Well, fine. Whatever they were up to this time, let someone else press them to accept half a loaf of good sense. They could send me postcards from jail, I didn't care. (Yeah, sure.) I angled myself next to my father as we filed into the dining room. I kept my voice low. "Are you guys in trouble again?" The again came out a little shrill. He didn't meet my eye. He just said, "No, no." Then he looked at Clement Kerrey. And Clement looked over my shoulder. I followed the chain of glances to Edward Hershey, walking a few steps behind me. If communication had taken place between him and Clement, it was now over. Edward grinned down at me. "It's great being back here. Your folks are so welcoming. Make me feel like part of the family." Part of the family. I could have smacked him.     Chapter Four     My landlord greeted me with the brusque question, "So you're finally through with all that corporate nonsense?" Ben Bubniak was a tall, unbent seventy-year-old with lank shoulder-length hair and watery blue bug-eyes. He was conservatively dressed in a Star Trek T-shirt and Navy surplus bell-bottoms. He was a lifelong friend of the family, and I used to spend hours in his apartment watching old movies on his VCR. Tonight, I just wanted to skip the amenities and pick up my keys. I just wanted to go upstairs and feel sorry for myself because I couldn't get stoned. "Glad you're back," Ben said, but he didn't look glad. "Although Kali worked out great. Miss her already." My former sublessee was a fellow red-diaper baby. She was a law student at Malhousie. She'd gotten in after bringing suit against the school, in fact, charging it with gender-based enrollment discrimination—probably the only sin that could not properly be laid at its door. I'd installed her in my apartment like a woman offering her dissatisfied mate a geisha. My parents and landlord had been crazy about her. I scanned Ben's place. I used to find it charming, with its walls of pulp science-fiction posters and its incongruous Victorian furniture. Right now, I was beyond being pleased by anything. I'd tossed the sunny side of my disposition off a pier. "Did my new furniture get here?" Ben nodded, his hoary brows lowered so he looked like an angry Moses. ''Good." Kali had wanted my shoddy old stuff out before she moved in, and I couldn't blame her. Last week, I'd refurnished the place with a phone call and a credit card. Catalog shopping would have appalled Thoreau, but it sure did simplify. Ben rooted my keys out of a desk drawer jammed with pamphlets, polished crystals, and old diskettes. "Need help taking your things up?" "No. I'll wait till morning. I paid for garage parking so I could be lazy tonight." "I heard you got yourself a car." I slipped the ring of house keys off his crooked finger before he could ask if I'd bought American. I hadn't thought about factory closings in Detroit until after I'd driven my Honda off the lot. Me, a former union labor lawyer. That was another reason I'd decided to flee Wailes Roth: I risked becoming a Republican by osmosis.       To read the rest of Prior Convictions, please go to Amazon's Kindle Store, Apple's iTunes Store or Barnes & Noble's Nook Store.             Books by Lia Matera     Willa Jansson Novels   Where Lawyers Fear To Tread A Radical Departure Hidden Agenda Prior Convictions Last Chants Star Witness Havana Twist   Laura Di Palma Novels   The Smart Money The Good Fight A Hard Bargain Face Value Designer Crimes   Short Story Anthologies   Counsel for the Defense and Other Stories Irreconcilable Differences         Praise For Lia Matera's Willa Jansson Series   "Willa Jansson is one of the most articulate and surely the wittiest of women sleuths at large in the genre." The New York Times Book Review "Readers will be shaken by Matera's rapier-sharp dissection of personal relationships and radical ideologies. Matera again demonstrates that she is one of today's best mystery writers." Publishers Weekly "Intelligent and entertaining... Absorbing... With sharp descriptions and crisp dialogue... admirably delivers the complex situations and memorable characters of a 'real novel' while still managing to let the detective story have its day in court." The Wall Street Journal "[A] distinctive voice, sharp wit, discussion of social and moral issues, insight into personal ideals and compromises and characters that grab your emotions." Washington Post "Willa Jansson is an unusually deep and complex character for crime fiction--tough-minded, sexual, vulnerable, lonely, morally alive… This is gutsy, grown-up crime-writing from one of the best practitioners around." Newsday "Matera's wit, grace with language, irreverence toward the legal system, and wry dissection of being a child of the Sixties make this a standout." Kirkus Reviews "Willa's cases and escapades always top the fun-to-read list... The beauty of Matera's writing is that the story, fun as it is, doesn't shortcut a shrewd social commentary." Houston Chronicle "Matera seems to really understand the moral and social issues that were on the deck in the late '60s and early '70s, and she's not interested in blowing them off.  She's smart enough to realize that many of these issues are still with us… Good stuff." Austin Chronicle "Blessed with pungent prose, an affecting, funny, realistic heroine/detective and pressing moral and emotional issues." San Francisco Chronicle "Matera's language is witty and sharp; her images by turn humorous and poignant.  The moral dilemmas with which her characters wrestle are real and wrenching." The Recorder "Her voice is clear and light, and she knows when to jettison the gags and get on with the story.  As long as Willa is still the star of the show, the series will stand out in the often homogenous mystery landscape." San Francisco Chronicle "Matera has produced a first-rate mystery, exhibiting her usual hallmarks of excellent plotting, solid characterizations, and brisk pacing." Booklist "The real pleasure is Willa, who alternates between humor and annoyance at her predicament—and whose love-hate relationship with men strikes a chord with many female fans." Entertainment Weekly "Almost everything a good mystery needs…a complex plot, social commentary, loads of atmosphere and a cast of unusual characters… The reader wants to hang out with Jansson and see more of her clear-eyed view of the world." San Jose Mercury News "Few writers possess Lia Matera's wry humor, especially when it comes to putting down lawyers." San Jose Mercury News "I'm in love with Willa!" John Leonard, National Public Radio's "Fresh Air"