Lion Plays Rough, page 6
“You talk to him if you feel you have to. If he tells you to go to hell, which I certainly would, given the mess you’ve already made of things, you and I will sit down tomorrow or the next day and have a discussion about whether we’re going to have to ask for a continuance on Scarsdale. I can’t justify entrusting one of my clients to someone with no future in this office.”
I remembered the kick I’d given Scarsdale this afternoon, the man’s sniveling confession, and felt a flash of shame.
“In the meantime, you’d better make sure your files are up to date.”
I was on a high wire with Jamil Robinson, but if I could just manage to stay there, it could be my big case. “Fine,” I told her. “I’ll write you a letter of resignation. You can keep it on file. If you decide to tear it up, okay. If not, I understand. You’re running a business. You’ve got to make decisions based on that.”
At last the bitterness broke out of her, her voice thickening. “You’ll do fine on your own. Better than fine. In this business it doesn’t pay to have too sharp a conscience.”
I swallowed the sting. “I owe you a lot, Jeanie.”
She’d already hung up. Teddy was still standing behind me.
“You should call the TV station and demand a retraction,” he said.
I turned away from him, opened the fridge, and stared into it. “Right now I’m going to drink a beer and go to bed. And first thing in the morning I’m going to drive out to Santa Rita.”
Teddy didn’t reply, his face neutral, or nearly so. After a moment he held out his hand. Forcing myself to see what was before my eyes, I passed him a beer.
Chapter 11
By nine thirty the next morning I was through jail security and waiting in an attorney meeting room. Santa Rita Jail is a huge place. With benches and trees and a wide lawn like a college quad, the exterior tries to camouflage what lies beyond the gates. Inside, it’s the same as any other jail, with the stink of unwashed bodies and low-nutrition food, anger and fear, sickness and desperation.
Where I found myself waiting was like all such rooms: small, with concrete block walls, a flimsy table and two plastic chairs. The deputy had locked me in. I heard him returning along the echoing hall, and then the door opened and admitted Jamil, wearing an orange jumpsuit identical to the one he’d worn yesterday at the DA’s office. The deputy closed the door behind him.
I stood and shook his hand. This time he wasn’t shackled. “I wanted to apologize,” I said.
He stared with an intent urgency into my face, his eyes bright. He seemed smaller today than he had yesterday. “No point apologizing,” he said in his high voice. “What’s done is done.”
“I came to see if there was anything I could do to help. You must have heard by now what was on the news.”
“I heard. Nikki dumped me.” He wore his vulnerability all on the surface; in a place like this such naked weakness could only lead to subjection. A man like Jamil would be on the lookout for a protector, a leader, a father or brother figure. He could easily have committed the murder he was charged with. Inside or out, whatever his daddy of the moment said to do, he would obey in a snap.
“A woman came to my office a few days ago pretending to be your sister and hired me to be your lawyer. Then someone pretending to be you called me on the phone and gave me the information about the meeting with Damon and Campbell.”
“Like I told you yesterday, I don’t got no sister.”
“You talked to Nikki recently?”
“I thought I would get with her yesterday, but they just drove me to the courthouse, brought me up to see you, then took me back. And then last night I hear about this shit.”
“You probably heard that a statement went out in my name, claiming to be your attorney. I didn’t make that statement. For me to be your attorney I’d need a piece of paper with your signature on it saying you wanted me to represent you. You haven’t given me anything like that. We never talked before yesterday. So I can’t very well be your lawyer, can I? You need to understand that.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes, and he slumped so low that he seemed to melt into the table. “Doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t do. The whole world gonna think I was behind those pictures, that I hired you to stick your nose in something that ain’t my business, that sure as hell ain’t yours. The whole world, man. Me and you, we like one dead man talking to another. There ain’t no point.”
“Someone’s been messing with both of us. I didn’t issue that statement. What are you talking about? Who’s going to want us dead?”
He didn’t answer the question. Maybe he thought it was obvious. I guess it was. Instead he said, “How come they said that statement was from you, if it wasn’t? How come they said you was my lawyer?”
I measured out a precise square on the table with my hands. “You might want to ask Nikki about that.”
He sat up. “Nikki!”
I looked at him. “Think about it. She represents Damon, doesn’t she? And Damon’s your boss? And he’s the one your lawyer has to point the finger at now that everyone has seen those pictures?”
“So what if she represents Damon? She represents everyone who works for him. How else you think she came to be my lawyer? You think I got money to pay her?”
“The way things stand, it’s him or you. And which one do you think she’s gonna choose?”
“You’re telling me Nikki set me up. Fine. And I’m telling you I’m a dead man.” Again he seemed to melt.
“I can’t prove it. But that press release makes you look like someone who tried to save his own skin by hiring your own lawyer and getting him to spy on your boss. Life would be a whole lot easier for Nikki if I’d been your lawyer all along. Then Damon doesn’t have to wonder where she’s at.”
“Nikki dumped me. And she ain’t even going to come tell me to my face.”
“You were supposed to plead guilty anyway. Isn’t that what she’s been telling you? So what do you even need a lawyer for, if all you had to do was roll over?”
“I been in prison before. Like I said, in here, out there, don’t matter. I’m through.” He looked up with a sudden idea. “How can Nikki make people believe you been my lawyer, when you’ve just been telling me you never was?”
“The thing is, I could be. These people who hired me in the first place, whoever they were, they paid me a lot of money. I guess they wanted to get your boss and Campbell pretty bad. The way I see it, that money rightfully ought to go toward paying for your defense. You can hire me, but you don’t have to. You want to go with another lawyer, that’s fine. Whoever he is, I’ll pay him.”
I hadn’t planned to make such an offer, but that money was dirty. Jamil deserved to choose his own lawyer—even if it was inevitable that he’d take me. The last thing I wanted was to make another link in the chain of pressures that had been applied to him.
“Guess I’ll go with you,” he said after a pause. “Not that it matters. I’m finished. And so are you.”
I hoped, for both our sakes, that he was wrong. Taking a retainer form from my briefcase, I filled in the blanks, acknowledging receipt of the ten thousand dollars. We each signed it. Now it was official: now I was working for him. Which meant Jeanie and I were done.
“All right, man, now that we’ve got that cleared away, let me tell you what happened,” he said.
I rose. The pictures were evidence that the relationship between Campbell and Damon was more complex than it ought to be, but I wasn’t ready to hear the story of the planted gun from Jamil’s mouth. “I’ll need to know what happened, but not yet. When the time comes, I’ll ask. For now, just try to remember as much as you can.”
“Shit, man,” he said. “Nikki didn’t want to hear it either.”
“Don’t worry. When I’ve finished my investigation, we’ll talk.” I rapped on the door. “There’s no chance of getting you out on bail, unfortunately, since you were on parole when you were arrested. So you’ll just have to sit tight.”
“Yeah, man,” Jamil said.
The rest of that day his despairing tone kept ringing in my ears.
~ ~ ~
Back in my office, I wrote out my letter of resignation, signed it, and left it on Jeanie’s desk. I called the district attorney’s office and asked for Fowler. He wasn’t there. I called again and asked for Cassidy. When she came on the line I explained that Nikki no longer represented Jamil Robinson. I was taking over.
“Okay,” she said skeptically.
“How about me?” I asked.
“Officially, I can’t say.”
“And unofficially?”
“The only advice I can give you is to consult an attorney.”
I laughed. I almost wanted them to go ahead and charge me. Almost.
Later that afternoon I heard that the Oakland PD had temporarily assigned Detective Campbell to patrol duty while the department investigated his ties to Damon.
That evening Jamil’s body was found hanging from a bed sheet in his cell.
Chapter 12
Reading the story in the Tribune in the morning, I felt a helpless rage. I had Jeanie tear up my resignation letter, but neither of us really believed it was over, that I was finished with it. There were too many loose ends. For now, though, I sought to lose myself in the Scarsdale case.
I spent Wednesday working on a motion to exclude the videotaped interviews of the child victim at the trial. Defending an innocent man is like walking a tightrope; you fear the tiniest slip. When you know the client is guilty, on the other hand, you’re an acrobat a foot above the ground.
It was an interesting, complex motion, and putting it together absorbed me entirely, in the way that only legal writing does. Wednesday night I was at the office until 1:00 am. Thursday morning’s breakfast was cold pizza from the night before.
I shouldn’t have spent so much time on it, but I needed to keep from thinking about Jamil hanging there in his cell, needed to keep from wondering what his last moments had been like. Whether the videos came into evidence or not, the girl herself still had to testify, and it was her live testimony that I was afraid of. I couldn’t very well keep her from taking the stand.
I could, however, keep my client from testifying, and I was faced with the task of finding a viable defense without him telling the jury he didn’t do it. Though we hadn’t definitely decided that Marty would testify, we’d proceeded under that assumption. Jeanie hated putting clients on the stand; she believed that it was at best a roll of the dice, and that most of them would, in the end, lack the composure to do anything but hurt themselves. Trust yourself, trust your evidence, trust the Constitution: that was her mantra.
And yet there’s no substitute for the horse’s mouth. No matter how relentlessly we attacked the police interviews, no matter how many motives we could give Erica for making up the story of Scarsdale molesting her, it was a child sex-abuse case. The law says it’s the prosecutor’s burden to prove the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; still, none but the greenest attorney believes the jury in a child sex-abuse case will follow that instruction. Given the revulsion such cases arouse, a defendant is effectively charged with proving himself innocent.
On the bright side, I wouldn’t have to babysit Scarsdale all week, wouldn’t have to spend those hours I’d dreaded rehearsing his testimony, wouldn’t have to hold his hand, coach him, warn him, reassure him. Now we wouldn’t have to go through the whole sticky pageant of rehearsal and cooperation. I was free to forget him, there in his hotel room, until the day of trial, free to set aside the human element and distill the case to a series of rhetorical formulations.
The trouble was the human element never stays down for long. Yet it wasn’t Scarsdale; it was me. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jamil—and about Lavinia.
“I know who she is,” I said to Teddy when I got home after filing my motion Wednesday night. “Or who she must be, at least.”
Teddy was parked in front of the TV watching SportsCenter with a beer, eating a bowl of cereal.
“She had inside information, which makes her connected either to Damon or to Campbell. She knew about their relationship and about their meetings. She didn’t seem like a gangster girlfriend, so I figure she’s got to be a cop.”
Of course the people who’d hired me, who’d set me up, were cops. I figured that the two of them must have wanted to expose Campbell but didn’t want to take on the career-ending alienation and contempt that comes with the code of silence, the thin blue line. Whatever was going on here, it was identical to the code of the streets.
That gun in Lavinia’s purse hadn’t been a cop gun, though. I just couldn’t imagine an off-duty officer carrying it. Nor was a Pontiac convertible a cop car. So maybe she’d been a cop but now was paid better. In any case, she had the inside scoop and wanted to do the right thing, wanted to see a crooked detective exposed.
In the morning I called two friends from law school who worked for the Alameda County public defender’s office. Neither of them could recall an officer who matched the description I gave. The hesitant quality of their voices told me it wasn’t much of a description. The only part of her I could picture clearly was her legs.
There was no official, public directory of Oakland police officers, certainly none with photos, but I knew that group portraits of every graduating academy class for the last fifty years hung in the public hallway of the headquarters building on Frank Ogawa Plaza.
It’s strange for someone like me, an attorney, to enter police headquarters without official business. I told myself that I was on public property, that as a citizen I had the right, but I still felt as if I were walking into enemy territory when I arrived just after eleven.
Lavinia was probably young enough to have become a cop during the last ten years. Two academy classes per year, about two dozen portraits to check, each showing between thirty and fifty new cops all dressed in identical uniforms. My job was made easier by the fact that there weren’t many women, and few of them were as tall as Lavinia.
I was contemplating the portrait of the second academy class of 1994 when a voice close to my ear whispered, “Lost?”
I turned, bumping into someone, stepped back, and met Campbell’s stare. He was dressed in a patrol uniform with his uniform hat under his arm. It looked wrong on him, clownish, making me wonder how long it had been since he’d worn anything but a suit. He seemed perfectly calm until I noticed the vein at his throat pulsing. Then his gaze shifted from my face to the picture I’d been studying. The caption beneath the photo listed her name as Lavinia Perry. She’d told me her real first name.
Campbell studied it for several moments, then with a kindly smile turned his gaze on me. But the smile didn’t reach his eyes. They were like pieces of glass underwater. “You know me,” he said, not a question but a statement of fact. “I know you, too,” he continued. “The dude with the camera. Leo.” His eyes moved to the class portrait. “Nineteen ninety-four. Seems like yesterday, doesn’t it?”
He began to whistle as he walked off, his hat still under his arm.
~ ~ ~
Back at the office, I was aware something was coming to a boil inside me. There was no question in Campbell’s mind that Lavinia Perry had been the one to hire me, and he knew where to find her, too.
She owed me an explanation, and perhaps she deserved a warning. Maybe while Campbell remained under the microscope of a departmental investigation he’d try to keep her out of it. She obviously knew more than she’d told me. No doubt her career would be hurt if it came out that she’d blown the whistle on her fellow officer. But if she were forced to tell everything she knew, Campbell would be the one hurt more.
A second call to the public defender’s office produced better results. When I mentioned the name, my friend Henry put the phone down and came back ten minutes later with a full report gathered from his colleagues, several of whom knew her as one of the most prolific earners of overtime for the Oakland Vice Squad. Another thing: she was an officer with a reputation for stretching the truth.
At 10:00 pm that evening I was sitting in my car down on International Boulevard, keeping an eye on Lavinia Perry. I’d followed her as she left the station garage in an undercover vehicle. She was dressed in high heels, fishnets, a short skirt, and a flimsy top, undoubtedly wearing a wire as she set off to work the corners of East Oakland. Her partners in the unmarked car were never far away. I’d watched them snag three johns in the last hour. At the moment of agreement, the lights and siren would swoop down.
According to Henry, during the last twelve months, Lavinia Perry had earned something close to seventy grand in overtime with her hooker act. One of the misdemeanor attorneys in the office had gotten the number out of her when he was grilling her on the stand, trying to make her look like someone who’d say anything for money. She was a good actress. I knew that. And she looked the part. In the streetlight, her halter top sliding down, her hair pulled back, she was the very ideal of what a lonely guy might be dreaming of, too good to pass up even if somewhere deep down a voice he didn’t want to listen to were telling him a real whore on these streets would never look so fine.
There were girls every block or so, most of them alone. Occasionally there’d be two or three standing together on a corner, punctuating the landscape of bodegas and auto parts stores. I’d been trailing them—Lavinia and her backup—from corner to corner, watching from a careful distance as they worked their routine. When after the three arrests they took up a new position at International and Thirty-Eighth, I got out. I didn’t know what I was going to say. Mostly I just wanted her to see my face.
