The Holdout, page 4
* * *
—
ROOM 1208 WAS exactly the same. The paintings, the desk, the chairs, even the coffee table appeared to be the very same ones that she’d lived with, every day and every night, for five months. She imagined that this was what an escaped zoo animal felt when returned to captivity.
She walked across the familiar patterned carpet. She touched the polished wood of the chairs. She stared at the paintings on the walls, the depictions of what looked like English fields. She used to imagine herself running through those fields. Being outside, feeling wind against her cheeks. Being anywhere, anywhere at all, other than where she was then…and, now, again.
Instinctively, she squeezed the key in her hand. Unlike last time, she could leave whenever she wanted.
“Pretty cool, right?” said Shannon. “Accuracy—historical accuracy—that stuff is really important to us.”
Maya ran her fingers along the desk. The wood had a well-oiled shine. But something was off. The surface was too smooth. She felt for the pockmark on the front ridge of the desk. She’d made it with a pen one long, frustrating night. The mark wasn’t there.
“We found hotel suppliers who had older models of the furniture,” Shannon offered. “We brought everything in last week.”
“These are copies?” Maya’s fingertips brushed the leather frame of the desk blotter.
“Same make, same model, same year. We got them from a hotel in Atlanta.”
Maya was standing inside a simulacrum of her old life.
The bedroom was identically furnished. There was a basket of fruits and chocolates on one of the side tables and a card that read “Thank you for joining us.” It was signed “Murder Town.”
That’s when she saw it, right beside the basket.
Maya had to step back.
“H-O-P-E” read the small, square button, its red, white, and blue lettering smudged and worn.
“What the fuck?” Maya said.
Shannon hurried into the bedroom. When she saw what Maya was staring at, she relaxed. “That was yours, wasn’t it? We thought it would be another fun reminder.”
“I used to have one of these on my backpack,” Maya said.
“Yes! I totally remember seeing it when you left the courtroom, after the verdict. That image of all twelve of you, walking away…I mean, that shit was iconic.” She paused. “Sorry.”
Maya couldn’t take her eyes off the button. “I still have this. I still have mine.”
“For saying ‘shit,’ I mean.”
“You got this online or something?”
“eBay. They’re collector’s items now. That was fifty bucks.”
It occurred to Maya that what once had been her actual life had been reduced to collectibles. Her memories had become memorabilia. They’d been commodified, boxed and traded, sold at a healthy markup.
She cringed.
She was complicit, wasn’t she, by being here? She was selling her past, or at least the only part of her past that anyone cared about, which was the part devoted to someone else’s tragedy. She’d watched in horror, over the years, as other people made fortunes off what she’d done. The networks, the memoirists, the journalists with “access.” How many people had gotten rich off the murder of Jessica Silver? There was the New York Times reporter whose book contextualized Jessica’s death within the nationwide epidemic of sexual violence against women—for a two-million-dollar advance. Who could doubt that reporter’s good intentions? And who wouldn’t be envious of her new brownstone in Cobble Hill? Or what about the famed documentarian whose six-part HBO examination of the case took such pains to highlight the LAPD’s long history of racial discrimination—surely his two Emmys and expanding production company were but the by-products of his honest convictions? There wasn’t a cause in this world so pure that someone couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable.
Maya had considered them all grave robbers. But now, standing inside the television re-creation of her former life, how could she claim to be any better? The fact that she’d given away her fee for being on this show, anonymously, to a Skid Row charity, did not absolve her of guilt. If the faded button in Maya’s hand proved anything, it was that her youthful good intentions had been worse than useless. The button was a reminder of the dangers of believing yourself to be better than you were. Salvaged, it had become a curiosity, like a rusted spoon recovered from the wreckage of the Titanic. It was now an object to be studied by scholars of a once-promising history.
What she missed the most about the person she’d been, Maya realized, was her hope for a coming world that turned out never to have been possible. She was nostalgic for an imaginary future.
Maya looked at Shannon, trying to guess just how young she was. Twenty-three, maybe. “Did you follow the trial?” Maya asked.
The girl brightened. “Oh my God, follow it? I was in junior high but yeah, I was obsessed. I still am. I begged for this job. To be assigned to you. I hope you don’t mind my saying…I mean, I don’t want to…If it’s unprofessional or whatever…”
“What?”
Shannon took a breath. “You’re my hero.”
Maya had no idea what to say in response to something so absurd.
“Why would I be your hero?”
“Because you took a stand. If everything Rick Leonard said is true…Well, you believed something, and you stood up for it. Maybe you were wrong. But you believed that Bobby Nock was innocent. And because you believed it, you talked all the others into seeing it your way—you fought not to let an innocent man be convicted and you won.” Shannon became suddenly embarrassed. “You know…right or wrong, you won. Fair and square.”
“I won,” Maya said. “Yeah…look at what I won.”
She gestured to the re-creation of a mid-priced corporate hotel suite around them. This wasn’t a canonization; it was an embalming.
Shannon frowned. The Maya she’d met had clearly not lived up to her expectations.
Then it was Maya’s turn to feel embarrassed. She ran her thumb over the smooth edge of the H-O-P-E button. “Some advice?”
Shannon crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Never meet your heroes?”
Maya smiled. Maybe this girl was tougher than she’d thought. “That shouldn’t be a problem,” she said. “If you can manage never to have any in the first place.”
* * *
—
THE FIRST TIME Maya had debated the evidence in the case of The People v. Robert Nock, she had been without legal training. Now, she had the advantage of both law school and four years as a practicing criminal defense attorney.
After ushering Shannon out, she performed a familiar pretrial ritual. She’d printed each major point of evidence out on a separate sheet of paper, and now she laid them across the coffee table.
She’d had a month to gather it all together. Not that she’d needed so much time. She’d been amazed by how little of it she’d forgotten. Looking over the actual, concrete physical evidence, she felt more confident than ever that Bobby’s acquittal had not only been just, it had been necessary.
* * *
—
AT JUST AFTER 3 P.M., Maya pushed open the double doors to the hotel restaurant’s private dining room and steeled herself to confront the timeworn faces from her former life.
There was Cal Barro standing with Peter Wilkie by the bar. Kathy Wing, Yasmine Sarraf, and Fran Goldenberg sat at a table against the far wall, picking at crudités. Trisha Harold and Lila Rosales were at a separate table, sipping from glasses of beer.
Rick wasn’t there yet.
Maya’s initial reaction was relief.
There was a little boy too, maybe five years old, pushing a toy truck across the floor, coming right for Maya’s feet.
“Aaron! Careful!” Lila Rosales chased after the boy as he scurried along with his truck. “Sorry,” she said to Maya as she passed. “That’s Aaron.” She whispered something in his ear, pointed at Maya, then took his hand and led him back toward her, his truck trailing behind him.
“Aaron,” Lila said, “say hello to Mommy’s friend.”
The boy extended his hand formally. “My name is Aaron.”
“Nice to meet you, Aaron. My name is Maya.” She gave his hand a good shake. “You know what they say about a man with a firm handshake? He’s honest.”
Lila laughed. “He likes trucks.” They watched him propel the toy across the room again. “In case you couldn’t guess.” She leaned in to give Maya a warm hug. “Hi, by the way.”
Nineteen years old at the time of the trial, Lila Rosales had been the youngest member of the jury. She had been in beauty school back then, and Maya had once marveled at how much effort it must have taken to prepare her immaculately made-up face every morning. Now, Lila looked worn. Her dark eyes seemed tired. The lines on her pretty face were not as well kept, or perhaps kept so effortfully that the labors showed. The pint glass in her hand was empty.
“He seems very mature,” Maya said. “Is his dad here?”
Only after asking the question did Maya think to check Lila’s finger for a wedding ring. There wasn’t one.
“Who knows where his dad is,” Lila said. “Things didn’t work out.”
Maya felt embarrassed as Lila explained that her babysitter had fallen through, and then Aaron’s grandfather was supposed to watch him, but then he couldn’t, and so eventually Lila decided it would be okay to just bring him to the hotel for the night, let him watch TV. That was okay, right?
Lila may have aged, but her need for assurance was still there. She had always been the kindest among their ranks. The most compassionate. When their deliberations became loud, angry, painfully acrimonious, Lila had always reached out to the person most viciously attacked by the others. Her instinct had always been to comfort whoever needed it most.
She asked Maya about her own life. No, Maya told her, she wasn’t married either.
“Hello!” Jae Kim appeared at Maya’s side and embraced both women in a three-way hug.
“How about that kid?” he said to Maya. “Lila did pretty good, right?”
Maya had to agree. Aaron seemed impressively confident, especially at that age.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Lila said. “How’re you?”
Jae told them that his retirement was going just great. Maya remembered that he’d worked in construction—and that he’d lost his job after the verdict. Nobody had said he’d been fired because he’d been on the jury, but they’d each found, in their own way, how impossible it had been to go back to their normal lives. He was probably only approaching sixty now.
Maya thought back on the late-night talk show host who’d referred to them, in a running bit, as “the twelve dumbest people in America.” There was one Saturday Night Live sketch in which they were portrayed as mouth-breathing lunatics who were literally drooling on themselves.
What must it have been like for Jae to try to return to work? Who wanted to set drywall alongside somebody who thought that Bobby Nock was innocent? What company wanted that much distraction over a worker making $17.25 an hour?
But talking to Jae now, he seemed to have made his peace with it.
No, she told him when he asked. She didn’t have a boyfriend.
Maya saw Trisha Harold and Fran Goldenberg glancing back at her from across the room. Trisha’s dislike—and eventual outright condemnation—of Maya ten years ago had been searing.
Maya marched right over. “Trisha! Can you believe it? Ten years…”
Trisha didn’t hesitate to give Maya a hug. “Would you believe me if I said that it’s good to see you?”
True or not, Maya appreciated the olive branch. “It’s good to see you too.”
Trisha was African American, tall but somewhat awkward about it, as if despite being middle-aged she was still getting used to her height. She explained that she’d taken an early retirement from her job as an IT tech in City Hall. Having worked for the government for so long, Trisha had always seemed the most comfortable amid the bureaucracy that had consumed their sequestered lives. She’d taken her three-quarters pension and moved to Houston to be closer to her kids and hadn’t been back to L.A. since. She didn’t miss it much.
If possible, Fran Goldenberg seemed even smaller than Maya remembered her. She had always been a maternal presence in the deliberation room. Every week she’d ordered a tin of cookies for the group and watched to make sure everyone ate at least one. She’d collected their black Sharpies after each excruciating vote. Maya had been grateful that at least someone was trying to keep things orderly.
Fran still lived in L.A., she said. Same place. And yet she hadn’t seen any of these people in ages! What was wrong with the lot of them, they couldn’t get together once a year or something? What silliness, that they should act like strangers! Half of them still lived close enough it was a wonder they hadn’t bumped into each other at Trader Joe’s.
Maya looked around: still no Rick.
“I haven’t seen him yet,” Trisha said pointedly, as if reading her thoughts.
“Who?”
Trisha raised an eyebrow. She deserved better than Maya’s coy bullshit, didn’t she?
“They told me everyone is coming,” Maya said. “Except Wayne.”
“He had a hard time after the trial,” Fran said.
“We all had a hard time after the trial,” Trisha said.
“Yes, of course,” Fran said. “But you know Wayne….He’s a sensitive man, and after everything he’s been through…”
Maya would never have described Wayne as “sensitive,” exactly. She’d have gone for “unstable.”
Trisha did not appear sympathetic either. “Okay.”
“He’s a good person,” Fran protested.
She had always seemed closer to Wayne than the rest of them had. Maya had never quite understood why. Maybe it was just that their rooms had been next door to each other’s. Or maybe the web of allegiances and rivalries that had developed between the twelve of them had been more complicated than she could possibly have known.
A few minutes later, Maya found herself on the other side of the bar with Cal Barro. He had to be near eighty, and was bone thin. L.A. born and raised, Cal had been the Eastside lifer among them, full of colorful stories from Silver Lake’s most debauched decades. A few of the stories had been a little too colorful for Carolina, Maya remembered. And now Carolina was dead.
Cal hadn’t gone to the funeral, he told Maya. Apparently none of them had.
Who was that coming over? It took her a second to recognize Peter Wilkie, delivering a glass of wine that she hadn’t asked for. Peter’s hair was starting to gray at the temples and it was shaved at the sides, the same length as the perfectly even stubble across his cheeks. The most white-guy of all the white guys, he acted like the tab was on him. Even though they all knew it was on the TV show.
He’d done something in finance that Maya had never understood. Now, Peter was in weed. Not in the sense of smoking a lot of it, he assured them. He meant professionally. He casually—or perhaps conspicuously—puffed from a hot-pink vape pen. His company made them. He handed her a business card.
It said, “Peter Wilkie. President and CEO. WEEDZ.”
“I have clients still in prison for marijuana distribution,” she said.
He nodded sympathetically. “It’s a travesty that legalization took so long. The opportunities out there right now are killer.”
A glass of wine later, Maya realized that she’d been here for two hours and still no sign of Rick.
She let herself hope that he might not show up for this part. He was coming for justice, after all, not happy hour.
Maya huddled for a bit with Kathy Wing and Yasmine Sarraf, listening to them compare notes on their respective children. Kathy had left her husband shortly after the trial, she said. “So at least something good came out of all that mess.”
Yasmine sympathized. “That was the hardest part, afterward…Trying to explain to David—my husband—what it was like. What do you even say?”
Maya knew the feeling. At some point, she forgot about the cameras in the corner. At some point, she got a drink she actually wanted. At some point, she got another. She stopped glancing over at the doors for Rick.
Time, Maya thought, had the strangest technique for smoothing old rivalries. Rather than gestating apologies, the years fomented a false nostalgia. It made them wistful for what had likely been the most miserable time of their lives.
The effect was pleasantly intoxicating. Maya was not immune to the brew. Whatever else you might say about these people, at least they’d known her when.
Then Rick walked through the door.
* * *
—
HE WORE A blue suit this time, and he entered the room with the same quiet assurance she’d observed at the courthouse.
Maybe she was feeling sentimental. Or maybe she’d just had more wine than she’d thought. But she found herself, somehow, glad to see him.
She watched Rick say hi to the others, one by one. He shook Peter’s hand, patted Fran on the back. He dropped to his knees to introduce himself to little Aaron, Lila hovering above them.
Finally, he caught Maya’s eye.
She made a face of exaggerated shock, raising her palms to the air like “What the hell?”—as if deeply offended that he hadn’t yet greeted her. He frowned in exaggerated regret—as if to show that he was saving the most momentous hello for last.
By the time they spoke, they’d already shared a private joke.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m really glad you came.”
“I should hope so.”
“Are you? Glad you came?”
