Spirit Invictus Complete Series

by Mark Tiro

  It dawned on Maya that she didn’t like herself when she had these kinds of thoughts. Sarcastic, caustic, bitter…. Just as quickly as the thought came, she pushed it off to the side, out of mind.

  She threw herself head first into her cases in order to obliterate exactly these types of thoughts. To keep them safely outside of her awareness. Even so, she had vaguely started to become aware of the pain her own thinking was causing her. But she would still forget each time she got caught up in the heat and the thrill of a new battle. Throwing her legal mind at finding and attacking the weakness in a prosecutor’s case, especially in front of a jury at trial—this was as good as it got for Maya. And it blinded her still. But she was starting to think that these attack thoughts may just be the source of her pain. Still, she loved the competition and she couldn’t see how she could give up the fight without giving up herself.

  Where the hell’s the evidence? What bullshit kind of theory is that to base a murder charge off of, less yet a first? She’d finished her tea, and she’d finished the reports as well. Seriously, what the hell? There is no evidence—no evidence!—that David was trying to kill himself. It was an accident. Just an accident! She raged silently. No way he should spend the rest of his life in prison for it. Not if I can help it, Maya vowed. This is exactly the kind of shit the DA does everyday—throw stuff up and see what sticks. Facing life in prison, the DA will probably make David some offer for a mere 10 or 20 years like they always do and they’ll be able to extort a guilty plea just so he can avoid the risk. And he would probably take it. Anyone would probably take it, Maya thought, sadly. Too much risk, facing life in prison, not to take it no matter how innocent you are.

  There was no evidence, of course, except that statement David had made to the police. For once in my godforsaken life, she simmered, could my clients please just shut up and not talk to the police?

  But what he had not told the police, the police just went ahead and fabricated. David had never told the police that he was trying to kill himself (and by extension, his daughter). That part, Maya was certain, was pure imagination in the mind of a Highway Patrol ‘expert’.

  7

  “To maintain inviolate the confidence, and at every peril to himself or herself to preserve the secrets, of his or her client.”

  —Business and Professions Code section 6068(e)(1)

  Johnny Cochrane took OJ’s secrets to his grave. And Maya took her duty as a lawyer to never disclose a client’s secrets just as seriously.

  Which is why, the next time Maya met with David in jail, she found herself turning discreetly to the side, acting like she was reading her file as he unceremoniously dropped his pants and sat down on the steel toilet in plain view in the corner of the cell.

  Ethical duties of a lawyer, the lawyer’s vow, she thought. To never speak of this moment….

  There was no privacy for county jail inmates from the roving eyes of the sheriff’s jailers. Even the newest lawyer figured out early on that a lot of bad things can happen when people and toilets are confined in close proximity. After he finished his business and washed his hands, David came over and sat down opposite from Maya.

  There it is again—that look. It’s like he’s there and not there at the same time. Maya quietly pondered the thought. She didn’t know what ‘it’ was, but whatever it was, it was unmistakable. He had started talking by now, but as he talked, Maya remained struck by this indescribable—What? She racked her brain. Calmness? Peace? Nothingness? She couldn’t place it. Even though David had started talking now, she remained fully aware as the moment, completely independent of whatever it was he was saying, stretched to envelop her, lingering another instant before finally disappearing.

  “Maya? Do you understand what I mean? What are your thoughts?”

  It was David’s voice now, and at last, it jolted Maya back to conversation.

  “I’m sorry, I missed that last part. Can you go over that one more time?”

  David went on talking again, but Maya found herself once more drifting, still unable to focus despite her best efforts. She drifted off and back, through time. It was just a flash, at first, and then a flicker. A glimpse she hadn’t expected. She saw an image, very clear, in her mind. It was a little girl, alone, in a room…. She looked at the girl, and for an instant the girl looked straight back at her. “Who?” Maya asked her silently. “Who are you?” But the girl didn’t answer. It was as if Maya could have communicated directly with the girl in her mind, as if the girl were some part of her, but for an imperceptible barrier that separated them. It was this wall that seemed to be keeping the girl silent—and Maya right along with her.

  “Do you understand what I mean?” she heard David’s voice ask, again, and more firmly this time. She snapped out of—well, she wasn’t sure what. Focus. Just try to focus, Maya reminded herself. But her mind kept drifting back, trying to remember, searching for the little girl she had just glimpsed.

  At the sound of his voice, the little girl was gone. Disappeared as fast as she had come. Maya was left here alone. Alone, in the visiting room of county jail, with only her client on the other side of the glass.

  David’s little girl was also gone. Disappeared in the accident that had brought him to jail and into Maya’s life. David was left here alone too. Alone in jail, and charged with his little girl’s murder—with Maya Lee the only person on the outside of the glass who would talk to him.

  “I’m still not sure I understand what you’re saying. Could you please go over that just one more time… just so I’m clear?” The line was cover; the kind of quick response she was capable of, when necessary. The truth is, Maya still had no clue what he had just said. But thinking on her feet had become second nature to her, and even seemed to happen unconsciously sometimes.

  David looked at her, quietly, as if waiting for her to fully come back to the present. While she did, the smallest outline of a smile flickered across David’s face. As if he could see the little girl also… no that’s impossible, Maya told herself firmly. But David waited patiently, and his lawyer finally drifted back in and took up her rightful place in their conversation.

  “Don’t worry, she’s not gone. No thought of love is ever lost,” David said. Maya looked up and saw in his eyes not the reproach for inattentiveness she had expected, but rather a gentle kindness. It was something she had not expected at all, and it threw her for a loop more than any amount of reproach ever could have.

  As tended to happen when someone cut too close, Maya felt anger snap up just then, all at once, inside of her. Well, your daughter’s never coming back, now is she? Who the hell are you to tell me anything! Later, when she got home, she thought back and realized that she didn’t have a clue why. But as soon as she’d seen this tender, almost vulnerable little girl—boom! As if Maya felt the need to defend against… well, she wasn’t sure what. But just like that, she’d slipped effortlessly back into… Where did that come from? I’m not an angry person. I probably didn’t need to attack him... She tried to think back to their conversation. Well he must’ve deserved it, she concluded. I just can’t remember what he was talking about…

  Maya hadn’t actually said the words, however. To her credit as a lawyer, Maya almost never said the angry words she felt. But her thoughts sat there nonetheless, not leaving her mind. They hovered in the background. And they floated around just beneath the surface of her awareness that afternoon as she finished a perfectly normal legal discussion with David.

  8

  “When are you going to get me the murder book Len? On the Nagai case?” Maya asked.

  While she had been covering the calendar two courtrooms down, Maya had run into Len Simonson, the DA on David’s case. A murder book is the discovery typically turned over to the defense in homicide cases—usually after a ridiculously long wait. Despite that, usually nothing substantive would happen on any murder case until the prosecution had gathered together all its evidence into this book (usually just a glorified name for a computer
file nowadays) and turned it over to the defense.

  And Maya didn’t trust this particular DA to turn it over. Not all of it at least. Not since last year when he’d tried to hide a video that showed her client in a different case was completely innocent. Simonson had been prosecuting that case too, and in the middle of that trial, he’d been busted when a witness mentioned that he’d given a video of the incident to the DA. Simonson had never turned it over, and she’d looked up at the witness just in time to see her mouth the word “sorry” to the DA. But it had been loud enough for the judge to hear. And for the court reporter to take down.

  That trial ended well for Maya. The case against her client had been dismissed. Maya liked to think that the worst part of it for Simonson wasn’t any state bar discipline (there wasn’t any). It was getting himself on to the top of one of Maya’s many lists.

  “Oh, I’m still waiting to hear back from the investigating officer,” Simonson fumbled around now, trying to answer Maya’s question about David’s case. He only managed to string the words together. “But I’ll let you know as soon—”

  She cut him off, her eyes gleaming. “You’re full of shit Len,” she told him, with a wink that didn’t quite conceal her contempt for him. “Just get it, okay?” Maya said it firmly, and then turned and walked away. The word she had wanted to finish with, but didn’t—“asshole”—ricocheted around her mind like a pool ball as she walked off toward the elevator.

  She appreciated the (mostly) socially acceptable job of being a defense lawyer, as much as for any other reason, because it gave her somewhere to direct her ire, which seemed to constantly simmer just under the surface. Maya channeled it into fighting for her clients. It was her outlet, and she knew it. It helped her stay a few steps ahead of the darker shadows in her mind, which seemed to recede at times, but never really disappear entirely.

  “No mom, I’m not going to medical school this year. I didn’t apply.” Maya had announced this to her mom one night, towards the end of her last year in college. She’d been home for a short visit.

  “Your uncle John did that. He went to college like you. I bet you didn’t know that. But then he took a year off. And you know what?”

  “What mom?”

  “It was a mistake he never recovered from.”

  “Uncle Johnny? Your brother? He always seemed to be just fine to me. What’s he doing now?”

  “Exactly Maya. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He never finished college. He took that year off, and then he never went back. You know what he’s doing?”

  “What mom?”

  “The same thing as last year. And the year before that. He drives a truck! In the middle of the night! Do you want that for yourself Maya? Do you? Because that’s what happens when—”

  “Wait, doesn’t he own his own company mom?” Maya abruptly cut her off. “It’s milk delivery routes, isn’t it? He drives a truck, delivering milk to stores. ‘Distribution routes’, it’s called, right? Dad always used to say he had a monopoly. So that’s what dad was talking about. How many people does Uncle Johnny have working for him now mom?”

  “It’s 15 now Maya. 15! But what does it matter!” her mom growled back at her. “He drives a truck. My brother the truck driver!”

  “Mom, you don’t have to worry about that. I already have a job lined up. It’s a small book publishing co-op. I start the week after graduation.”

  “Well, I’m not supporting you. Just so you know. But I suppose I could make a phone call to Johnny and see if there’s a spot for you driving trucks.”

  “Mom! I have a job. You don’t have to talk to Uncle Johnny for me. It will be fine.”

  “It will be fine,” Maya’s new boss at the book distribution co-op told her, just two weeks after she started. “I’m sorry, this whole internet thing’s really done a number on us here. Thrown us for quite a loop. Another two stores we distribute to are closing this month. Can you hold off on cashing that check we gave you yesterday? Please? It’d really help us out. Just a couple weeks to get this all straightened out.”

  Which is, of course, how Maya knew that it most certainly would not be fine.

  And which is also why, later that week, Maya decided to go to law school.

  She did spend the rest of that year, however, waking up at four in the morning driving a milk distribution truck for Uncle Johnny.

  “Hi there Maya. Funny seeing you here again.” A lawyer in a smartly tailored suit sat down next to Maya as they both waited in the courtroom for their cases to be called. Ani Barakian was the lawyer, and when she saw Maya, she smiled and gave her a big hug. Maya and Ani had gone to law school together before Ani had joined the DA’s office and Maya headed off to be a PD.

  The old friends had only found themselves on opposite sides at trial once. A few years back, they had both suffered through a counterfeit purse case that probably should have taken three days. The trial judge though, was apparently mad at having been assigned the case and strung it out to almost three and a half weeks in order to make a point to the presiding judge. For good measure, Ani had also decided to fly in one expert witness from New York, and a second one from Paris.

  “That’s really overkill,” Maya had pointed out at the time. “You don’t need any more wits to prove your case.”

  “Oh, I know honey,” Ani had told her at the time. “But if the judge wants to string this out, the least we can do is help him, right? Plus, both the experts are going to bring the newest line of purses… as exhibits for the jury.” Ani had winked, adding, “I think seeing those is worth a few more days in trial, don’t you Maya? Justice cannot be rushed.” Needless to say, it had been one of the more memorable trials of both of their careers.

  “You know, I think you’re on this case I just got,” Ani told Maya.

  “Which one?”

  “Murder case. I forgot the name. Car accident. Guy’s daughter died. The office wants me to babysit the case until they can figure out who to give it to. In the meantime, let me know if I can get you any discovery or anything. I have a whole bunch of stuff upstairs to give you. You should have gotten it already. I’m not sure what happened. Also if there’s anything else you need…”

  “What happened to Simonson?” Maya asked. “Break his leg or something?”

  “Worse—state bar suspended him. Didn’t turn over DNA to a pro-per defendant. Guy represented himself, so it probably wouldn’t have mattered, but he ended up doing 15 years on a life sentence, until one of those innocence programs got involved. They had the DNA tested. Turns out not only was the guy innocent, but Len had known it the whole time. He’d had the DNA tested, but when he didn’t like the results, he just buried it.”

  Maya was caught off guard, and it took Maya a moment to process.

  “What? I’ve never heard of anything like this ever happening to a DA. How?” she asked Ani.

  “Cop was going down for it either way, so he turned on Simonson and cut a deal to take him down with him,” Ani said.

  “Wow. Well, couldn’t have happened to…” Maya knew she was piling on, but couldn’t help herself. “Couldn’t have happened to a better guy….”

  “Wait, don’t tell me. Is he on your list Maya? Are you still keeping those ridiculous lists of yours?” Ani asked. Then Ani put a hand on Maya’s shoulder. “Oh honey, your lists are going to kill you. What happened to happy Maya? Remember when we did that semester abroad in Mexico for law school? We rented that flat together.”

  Maya thought back to those six weeks one summer when they had both taken a summer school law course at the university of the small colonial town. The whole thing had been more vacation than anything else.

  “We studied free trade law, right?” Maya asked.

  Ani laughed. “Close. It was customs law, remember? But I don’t think that kept you from practicing free trade in our flat every night with that cute Mexican boy.”

  Anyone else might have blushed. Maya smiled. But a thought came to Maya, and she sat down, be
fore turning back to Ani. “Happy Maya?” she said. “You must have me confused with someone else. There was never a happy Maya.”

  Ani smiled politely, not quite able to gauge whether her old friend was being serious or sarcastic. When she did, Maya joined her. But quietly, Maya wondered if maybe there was more truth to it than she wanted to admit to herself.

  9

  Once she was home that night, Maya plugged in the old external drive she kept around just for this sort of thing. She put in the disc that Ani had sent over to her office earlier that afternoon. And then she sat down on her couch to listen to it. So much better listening to these things at home sitting around in underwear than staying late in the office, she thought as she pulled the blanket up over her. That night, Maya at last got to listen to David’s full statement for the first time—the one he had given to the police the night of the accident.

  Well, not actually the full statement: a quarter of the way through, Maya fell fast asleep.

  Asleep on the couch, Maya dreamed.

  She had gone into a store to buy something. She couldn’t remember what, but she did know that whatever it was, she didn’t need it. Just killing time to keep the boredom at bay. When she came out though, funny thing—she couldn’t remember where she had parked. It wasn’t that someone had stolen her car. She knew that much—she just couldn’t, for the life of her, remember where she had parked her car.

  And so she looked around for her car, until she found herself standing just outside the door to a small room. The room was buried deep underground. Maya had been here before. She knew as much. But she had never gone in. This time, she was determined. My car is parked in there, she dreamed. And then, in her dream, she pushed the door open.