Judgment Calls Page 12
Walker said, “All we got is that he’s lied for his brother in the past and is no stranger to the system himself.”
“Yeah, but is the jury going to hear about that?” Ray Johnson asked.
I nodded my head and popped open a can of Diet Coke that Calabrese tossed me from the MCT mini-fridge. “The priors for sure. As soon as a person takes the stand, all his felony priors come in to impeach. I’m sure the jurors will be real impressed that big brother’s got a robbery and two forges. As far as his statement backing Derringer on the last beef, I filed a motion to get it in. Have to wait and see. If the jury hears about it, Derringer’s toast. They’ll not only know that the alibi’s bullshit, but they’ll also figure out that Derringer’s done this kind of thing before.”
Mike’s beefy hands looked awkward opening a tiny snack pack of chocolate pudding that I imagined his wife packed in his lunch every day. I tried to ignore the fumbling and focus on what he was saying. “I say they’re taking a big risk putting the brother up there. They can’t possibly think anyone’s gonna buy this alibi deal. I mean, what about the fucking print on the purse, for Christ’s sake? I mean, don’t you think I’m right on this, Samantha?”
“All the way. Like I said, Lisa’d be better off arguing reasonable doubt on the legal elements of the most serious charges, instead of going with this alibi defense. I still can’t figure out why she’s doing it. It’s got to be coming from Derringer. Probably figures that, with the prior attempted sod, the judge will tee up on him even if he beats the attempted murder and the accomplice charges. Figures if he’s going down for the count anyway, he may as well roll the dice and try to beat the whole thing.”
Chuck pushed his palms against the edge of his desk, rolled his chair back a couple of feet, and crossed his arms. “He must have some loaded fucking dice, because I don’t see him beating a damn thing with this weak-ass witness list.”
It’s a fundamental truth that the number and density of cuss words increases exponentially as the number of cops and DAs in a room goes up.
“I’m glad you’re so confident,” I said. “I recognized the big brother, and I knew Lisa’d be calling Jake Fenninger. He’s the cop who popped Kendra on Christmas. But I don’t have a clue on the other three. Enlighten me?”
“Well, let’s start with Geraldine Maher and Kerry Richardson. Know what they have in common?” Chuck raised his eyebrows, daring me to guess. When I continued to stare at him, he said, “They work at Lloyd Center.”
I felt my eyes widen. “The shopping center? What does a fucking mall have to do with my attempted murder case?”
“I wouldn’t have put it together except for the last name on the list, Timothy Monrad. Rad was a new recruit for the bureau last summer. Works northeast neighborhood patrol, including—you guessed it—Lloyd Center.”
“Nice of Lisa to let me know that one of her witnesses is a cop,” I said.
“Don’t freak out. It’s not a big deal,” Chuck said with confidence. “See, Kerry Richardson comes up in PPDS as a complainant over and over up at Lloyd Center. Turns out he’s what they call a ‘loss prevention officer’ at Dress You Up, that discount department store down at the end by the movie theater?”
I nodded to let him know I recognized the name.
Chuck continued. “OK, so when I saw Rad’s name on the list too, I was psyched. I figured there might be some connection through Lloyd Center. So I ran all of Rad’s arrests at Lloyd Center and cross-referenced them with Richardson’s PPDS records. I found a report from January where Rad was the arresting officer on a trespass that Richardson called in. The trespasser was Andrea Martin.”
“That’s right. I remember. I ran Andrea’s record in February as background. She had no convictions, but I did see a real recent arrest for trespass somewhere.” I didn’t pursue it, because even if I called Andrea to the stand, misdemeanor trespass is not the kind of crime that can be admitted into evidence against a witness. And her case hadn’t even been issued; it was just an arrest.
Chuck continued. “The somewhere was Lloyd Center. I pulled the arrest report. Back in November, Kerry Richardson thought he saw Andrea shoplifting in the store. He went and got the manager, Geraldine Maher, and the two of them stopped Andrea outside in the mall. She had receipts for the things in her bags, but Richardson insisted he’d seen her sneak something. They figured she must have stashed whatever she stole somewhere right outside of the store. They didn’t call police, but they did eighty-six her from the store. Richardson must have some memory, because when Andrea came back into the store in January, he recognized her and called police. Rad made the arrest. Andrea told Rad she just assumed that the eighty-six from the store had ended by then.”
“I’m not surprised we didn’t issue that. Sounds like she never should’ve been excluded in the first place.”
Ray Johnson was laughing. “So that’s it? The whole defense is that the vic’s a whore, her mom’s a trespasser, and Derringer’s scum brother says they were watching TV?”
I was just as bewildered. “I don’t know what the hell Lisa’s thinking. The jury’s going to hear about Kendra’s background from me. I’ll go over it during voir dire, opening, and Kendra’s direct, so Lisa doesn’t get any mileage by calling Fenninger. She can’t get in those Lloyd Center witnesses to impeach Andrea. And even if she did, who would care?”
Mike Calabrese gave me a thumbs-up. “Lock and load, baby. That’s what I say.”
I love it when a plan comes together.
* * *
I left the detectives at the Justice Center and walked over to the courthouse to review my trial notebook one last time. I had already outlined the topics I wanted to discuss during jury selection and had written my opening statement, the direct examinations of the state’s witnesses, and the cross-examination of Derrick Derringer.
I no longer carried the anxiety I’d been shouldering all week about Lisa Lopez’s list of defense witnesses. She was desperate if she was trying to get Kendra and Andrea’s prior arrests into the record. No wonder she’d been pretty quiet about the case when I’d seen her around the courthouse lately. I had to admit a certain level of smug satisfaction. If it hadn’t been for her initial bravado, I’d feel sorry for Lisa. She was going to spend her next two weeks stuck with a major barker at trial, all for a scumbag sex offender who wanted his free lawyer to present a preposterous defense that he and his dimwit brother cooked up. But after Lisa’s attempts to get under my skin at arraignment, I was going to enjoy handing her a solid trouncing at trial.
I called Chuck around seven to see if he was ready to go. We had finally gotten around to rescheduling dinner with my dad. He agreed to meet me at my car; I was uncomfortable letting the other MCT detectives know that we were spending time together outside of work.
Dad opened the door before we could knock. “You sure the city can make it through the night without you guys? I tell you, with the two of you working together, the bad guys had better watch their backs.” Dad always found creative and not so subtle ways of letting me know that in his view Chuck and I belonged together.
Dad was making his specialty, steak on the grill. Dad’s like a lot of men of his generation. Wouldn’t think of putting together a full meal in the kitchen, but sees cooking an entire dinner outside as one of the great manly traditions, like hunting, fishing, or teaching a kid to bat.
Dad took Chuck out to the deck to show him his new Weber while I poured us some wine. Watching them crouched by the grill reminded me of the summer the two of them built the deck. It was right after our college graduation, mine from Harvard, Chuck’s from the University of Oregon. Chuck had decided not to leave the state for college, a decision his parents had harangued him for until they realized it would be bad form for the governor and his wife to suggest their son was too good for the state’s best public university. By the time Chuck graduated, the former Governor Forbes spoke at commencement of the pride he felt when his son turned down the Ivy Leagues for U of O.
That summer was also the summer I told Chuck he had to fish or cut bait. I had vowed not to bifurcate my life anymore between him and everything else. At Harvard, I missed out on things that other kids experience when they go away to school, because my heart had stayed with Chuck back in Oregon. When other kids took summer internships on the Hill or in Manhattan, I had faithfully returned to Portland, four years in a row. I decided law school would be different.
So I’d begged Chuck during our senior year to live up to his potential and apply to graduate programs around the country. He was accepted into Stanford Business School and put down his deposit over Christmas break when I sent my acceptance to the law school. By spring break, he was saying that he hadn’t gotten used to the idea of himself in business school, and, by summer, he was thinking of pulling out.
So I told him to choose.
Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that. I cried for two hours and told him that I loved him and wanted to be with him and couldn’t picture my life without him in it. I said that moving to Stanford with him would make me happier than I’d ever been, and then I told him to choose.
He chose to cut bait. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he knew he didn’t want to go to California, and he knew he didn’t want to go to business school. He was thinking of becoming a cop.
I didn’t handle it well. I laughed at him and asked what it would be next: astronaut or firefighter. I told him he’d never grow up and would never amount to anything. I pointed out that he’d been given every advantage in life—privileges other people actually had to work for—and took it all for granted. When my tirade finally ended, he went outside, finished up the last coat of stain on the deck, and walked out. I didn’t see him again for six years.
I’d heard he’d joined the bureau, of course. I’d actually considered turning down the job at the DA’s office because of it. But I had no interest in the alternatives I’d been given at the city’s big firms, and Roger knew it. There’s no good way to tell your husband that you’re making employment decisions based on an old boyfriend, even if it is to avoid him. So, instead, I’d played the odds that I could avoid one of the county’s two thousand cops, at least for a while.
When I saw his name on the police reports for my first trial, I tried to ready myself. I prepared the speech in my head and went over it again and again in the shower that morning, the way I should have been rehearsing my opening statement. I was going to apologize for all the venom that came out of me that day. Then I would laugh as I said it all worked out for the best in the end, since he’d accomplished what he wanted, and I was so happy with Roger.
None of it was ever said. He walked into my office with his patrol partner, handed me a cup of coffee, and said, “Jason Hillard, meet Samantha Kincaid. Kincaid and I went to Grant High together. So what’s the game plan?”
I’d prepped them for the trial, but the case turned into a bench warrant when the defendant no-showed. Two years later, looking at Chuck with my father, I realized I’d still never apologized to him for how I behaved that summer, nor had I thanked him for saving me from having to do it when I wasn’t ready that day in my office two years ago.
* * *
They came back into the kitchen with the steaks, and Dad started heaping mass quantities of food onto three plates. I set the table, blinking away tears before any could roll down.
“I was just telling Chuck about the damage you did last weekend at the target range,” Dad said.
My entire life, my father has enjoyed gun collecting and target shooting. Cursed with having a daughter as his only child, he had tried repeatedly to spark some interest from me, but to no avail.
To his initial chagrin, I eventually learned to use a gun only when my ex-husband insisted on keeping one in our New York apartment. If he was going to keep a loaded handgun in an unlocked nightstand, I figured I sure as hell better know how to use it. So some of the agents took me to the ATF firing range and taught me how to load, aim, fire, and reload just about every weapon available, legally and otherwise, in the United States. As irrational as gun ownership is as practiced by the most hard-core of American gun lovers, I’m a good enough shot and get sufficient shooting practice that I find a sense of security in the .25 caliber automatic that I keep taped to the underside of my nightstand drawer.
Chuck took his attention away from his steak long enough to say, “I never would’ve believed it if someone had told me back in high school that Sam would grow up to be a beef-eating gun toter who likes to put bad guys in prison.”
“Remember when she decided to be a vegetarian her junior year?” Dad was laughing so hard I thought he was going to choke. “God, she tried. Decided eating meat was so barbaric.”
Chuck was nodding his head in agreement. “Right. But, in the end, she hated the idea of being hypocritical even more, and, try as she could, she couldn’t live a one-hundred-percent animal-friendly lifestyle.”
That’s why I’ve always felt so at home with Chuck. He got me. He could take the traits that other people see as so inconsistent and understand that they make me who I am. I eat like a pig, but I run thirty miles a week. I despise criminals, but I call myself a liberal. I’m smart as hell, but I love TV. And I hate the beauty myth, but I also want good hair.
To Chuck, it somehow all made sense, so I never felt like I was faking anything. Dad has never quite figured me out, but he sure enjoys making fun of me. “Poor girl drove me and her mother crazy trying to avoid leather, animal fat, anything that might make her seem like a hypocrite for telling everyone else how mean we were for eating meat.”
I had to laugh too, remembering my mother’s face when she opened her Christmas gift one year to find the hideous macramé purse I’d triumphantly presented as an alternative to her tried-and-true tasteful brown leather handbag.
“Does rubbing my face in my youthful attempts to be a good person make you guys feel good?” I said. “OK, you win. I love the smell of leather. I like being at the top of the food chain. I eat thick slabs of beef, still pink in the middle. Vegetables are what my food eats. Are you happy now? Maybe we should talk about the time Chuck joined the feminist center in college so he could scam on women. Or how about, Dad, when you got a CB radio and grew a mustache after you saw Smokey and the Bandit? What was your handle again, the Rocking Ranger?”
We continued like that, recalling our most embarrassing moments—at least the ones clean enough to tell in front of my dad—until the high-pitched beeping of a pager broke through our laughter. By instinct, Chuck and I both immediately hit the “stop making that wretched noise” button on the right side of our waists and looked down at the digital display. “It’s me,” I said. “Grace. I better get it.”
Grace was calling to let me know that she’d dropped off Kendra and to wish me luck with trial the next day. She also told me that when she went inside with Kendra, Kendra had played the answering machine in front of her. Apparently, her old friend Haley was looking to get back in touch with her, had heard that she was living at home again, was wondering what she was up to, that sort of thing. It was hard not to be furious as I remembered my only encounter with the girl.
I tried to keep cool as I dialed Kendra’s number.
“Hey there. How you holding up?”
“Alright, I guess. I just want the trial to be over with.”
I said what I could to relieve the anxiety. In the end, there’s nothing you can say to comfort a victim who senses the system’s potential to fail.
I raised the phone message from Haley with caution. “Grace mentioned that Haley is trying to get in touch with you. I didn’t realize you had stayed in contact with her.”
“I haven’t. She called, that’s all.”
“She give you any idea what she wanted?” I said.
The distinctively teenage sulk came through loud and clear over the phone. “Will you please, like, not freak out? She was just wondering how I was doing.”
I didn’t like the idea that H
aley might be working her way back into Kendra’s life, so I said what I could to discourage her from returning the call. I knew in the end she’d do what she wanted.
* * *
I’d been looking forward to curling up with a book and going to bed early when I got home. That’s not what happened.
I should’ve known something was wrong as soon as I put my key in the lock. Vinnie usually runs to the front door to welcome me home. OK, so it’s more of a waddle. The point is that he comes to the door when he hears my keys. This time, I could hear Vinnie barking, but he wasn’t at the door.
I remember the noise behind me in the dark as I bolted the front door. And I think I remember feeling the crack against my head that quickly followed, but maybe I fabricated that memory later with the help of blinding head pain and a lump the size of a golf ball.
When I came to, the clock told me I’d been out for an hour. My house was a wreck. Cupboards were open, cushions were thrown, drawers were emptied. And I could still hear Vinnie’s muffled barks from somewhere in the back of the house.
As much as I wanted to run to him, I’d watched enough scary movies to know what to do if someone might be in your house. What you don’t do is creep around in the dark silence. That’s how you wind up skewered by some guy in a bad mask.
Instead, I went to my car, started the engine, and used my cell phone to call 911. And my dad. And then Chuck. And then I realized I could call everyone I knew, and it wouldn’t get the first of them here any faster.
So I waited and watched. Even when I could hear the sirens, still no sign of life. Whoever tore the place apart must have left after knocking me out.
Two patrol officers swept through the house while the EMTs finished checking me out in the ambulance. No concussion, just assurances that I’d have a brutal headache for the next forty-eight hours.
The police cleared me to enter after I showed them my ID and assured them I knew how to handle a crime scene. A pane in the back door had been smashed to gain entry.