In My Dark Dreams

by JF Freedman

  “Don’t you have a fellow who says he was with Roberto almost all night when one of the murders took place?” Amanda probes, as she chopsticks a piece of sashimi into her mouth. I’m passing on that; raw fish is a no-no when you’re pregnant. There’s plenty of other good stuff for me to savor.

  “That’s the problem,” I answer. I swallow and wash my food down with an Arnold Palmer, which is a mixture of iced tea and lemonade. “Almost is not the same as the whole time. There’s a window Roberto could have exploited.”

  “If he is the killer,” Amanda says pointedly. “We can’t stop believing in him.”

  She says that more as if it’s a wish than a conviction.

  “We have to be realistic,” I say. “Positive, but realistic.”

  “You sound like you’re throwing in the towel,” she reproaches me.

  I shake my head. “I never quit until the end. And there is always the chance of an eleventh-hour surprise. But I know what evidence they have and I know what evidence we have, and they have the goods.”

  “So you think there’s no chance those underpants were planted.”

  “By whom?” How many times do we have to beat this dead horse?

  She gives in. “I have no idea.”

  “This isn’t Perry Mason,” I remind her. “We’re not going to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Not when there isn’t one in there to begin with.”

  The dispatcher who took the telephone call stating that a suspicious-looking Latino was near the location where the last murder had taken place is sitting in the witness chair. Ever since 9/11, people are much more sensitive to anyone in their neighborhood who doesn’t fit in, so the police get a lot of calls like this one. She had contacted the closest undercover officers on the scene, and they followed through.

  “Who made this call?” Joe asks her, when he starts his cross.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t the numbers automatically come up on your system?”

  “Yes,” she answers, “but this call came from a pay phone, so we don’t know who made it, just the location.” She has the evidence slip of the record of the call in her hand. “An AM/PM Mini-Market in Brentwood,” she reads off.

  I make a note to discuss this with Joe. In an age when everyone has a cell phone, pay phones are almost as anachronistic as dinosaurs. Whoever placed that call may have made it from a pay phone to hide his identity. I also make a note that we should ask Cordova, when we cross-examine him on the stand, if that pay phone was checked for fingerprints. How many people would have used it between the time the call came in and the time they arrested Salazar? Not many, I would think. Maybe only one.

  “Was it a man or a woman who called this in?” Joe asks.

  “A man,” the dispatcher answers.

  “Did he have any kind of accent you could make out?”

  “I don’t remember. We get hundreds of calls every day.”

  “Do you tape these calls?” Joe asks.

  “Yes, we log them in and tape them.”

  “Does that tape still exist?”

  “Yes. We keep them for five years.”

  I make another note to subpoena the tape. We can get it by the end of the day and listen to it tonight. This is an oversight—that we didn’t do it earlier—although in truth, I can’t see how it will help us, unless the “real” killer made the call, because he had planted the panties in Salazar’s truck, and this was part of his grand scheme to frame an innocent man.

  Venturing down that road is a great way to make yourself crazy. As I told Amanda over dinner last night, we will stay positive, but we also have to be realistic. And that idea is not realistic. I may go nuts at times, as I did with Jeremy, but I am not insane.

  The detective who alerted Cordova to Salazar’s being in the area is on the stand. Arthur Wong has the honors.

  “You and your partner took the call from dispatch?”

  “Yes,” the detective answers. Another sports coat, slacks, and crisp white shirt ensemble. Half-Windsor knot in the tie, American flag pin in lapel. Do these guy buy their clothes from the same place? Like teenage girls, do they call each other in the morning and check on what the other members of their unit are wearing, so they don’t repeat, but don’t stand out, either?

  “How far were you from the suspect’s location?”

  “A couple of blocks. Took us no time to get there.”

  “When you got there, what did you see?”

  A man sitting in a truck, reading a newspaper.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I called Lieutenant Cordova and told him what we were looking at.”

  “What was his response?”

  “Keep an eye on the man, but don’t approach him. Which is what we did.”

  “Okay,” Wong says. “What happened then?”

  “Lieutenant Cordova arrived a few minutes later.”

  “Upon which time you and your partner and Lieutenant Cordova searched the suspect’s vehicle, found incriminating evidence that linked him to the Full Moon Killings, and arrested him?”

  “That is correct.” Wong gathers his notes.

  “No further questions.”

  That was short and sweet. The prosecution is holding back getting into the meat of the search until Cordova is on the stand. He’s the main man, he carries the weight. They want the jury to hear about what happened from the big dog. This witness, and others like him, are along for the ride, to add extra ballast.

  I take my place at the podium. “Good morning, Detective Killebrew.”

  “Good morning,” he greets me.

  I consult my notes for the third name. “You and your partner, Detective Mayweather, searched the truck, along with Lieutenant Cordova.”

  He crosses one leg over the other and straightens the knife-sharp crease of his trousers. “That’s correct.”

  “Which of you three actually found the panties?”

  “Lieutenant Cordova.”

  I look at my notes again. “Under the floor mat in the cab of the truck?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you at the time Lieutenant Cordova found those panties? Were you searching in the cab, too?”

  He shakes his head. “No. I was in the back of the truck. Me and my partner were searching through the suspect’s implements.”

  “His tools? Lawnmower, shears, that sort of equipment?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What were you looking for?”

  He seems surprised at the question. “Evidence,” he answers.

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “Something that would tie him into the killing that had happened earlier.”

  “Specifically, what kind of evidence, Detective Killebrew?”

  “What I just said—anything that could tie him to the victim.”

  “Anything meaning underpants? The victim’s missing underpants?”

  “Anything that might have belonged to her. A wallet, some other means of identification—”

  “Was her wallet missing from the crime scene?” I butt in. I look through my notes again. “I don’t see anything here that states her wallet was missing.”

  “I don’t know,” he backpedals. “I used that as an example.”

  I lean as far forward on the podium as my stomach will allow, which isn’t much. “Is it not true that you were hoping to find a pair of underpants that had been taken from the crime scene? The panties that had belonged to the victim that were missing when her body was discovered? Isn’t that what you were specifically looking for, Detective?”

  He uncrosses his legs. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” I say. A small point, but they all help. They had a preconceived idea when they conducted their search: a predisposition to find the panties that would tie Salazar to the victim. “And in fact, those panties were found, weren’t they? Lieutenant Cordova found them.”

  He bites off his words. “Yes, I’ve already said that.”

  He’s a b
it testy now, which is good for us. The jury will pick up on that, which down the road will subliminally help me. Civilians, meaning everyone who isn’t in law enforcement, have a love/hate feeling toward cops. They want them to be there for protection, but they are afraid they will use their position and authority to screw them over. This is more true in Los Angeles than in some other cities. It’s not that your average Los Angeles policeman wants to be menacing; usually it’s the opposite—they want to be helpful and nonthreatening. But the history of this city, going back decades and continuing on to the present time, doesn’t allow that, emotionally and psychologically. Too much confrontation, too much casual, even unconscious, intimidation. There are people sitting on this jury in front of me who have had a bad situation with an LAPD cop, or had a close friend or relative who did. They will trust the police to a point, but if that line is crossed, they won’t.

  “Lieutenant Cordova found them,” I repeat. “So then he did what? Called you and the other detective to come see what he had found?”

  Killebrew licks his lips, an involuntary, nervous gesture. “No. He showed them to us.”

  “Showed them to you? How do you mean?”

  “He put them in a plastic bag and showed them to us,” the detective says.

  “Outside of the truck cab?”

  “Yes.”

  I look at the jury. A few of them have picked up on the distinction. They sit forward in their chairs.

  “So you never actually saw those panties in Mr. Salazar’s truck, is that what you are telling us, Detective Killebrew?” I continue. “Mr., excuse me, Lieutenant Cordova took them out of the truck, where he found them under the floor mat, put them in a plastic evidence bag, and then showed them to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he had found them stuffed under the passenger side floor mat.”

  “But neither you nor your partner saw them there yourselves. You did not see them under the floor mat of Mr. Salazar’s truck, or anywhere in Mr. Salazar’s truck.”

  “No,” he answers. “We didn’t actually see them inside the truck.”

  The unknown man who called in Salazar’s location to 911 sounds as if he either had laryngitis or is deliberately trying to camouflage his voice to prevent identification. Joe and I listen to the recording several times.

  “Fishy,” Joe concedes, after we put it back in its case. “But not enough.”

  “Can’t we use it?” I ask.

  “How?”

  “To show that whoever called that tip in didn’t want to be identified.” I’m getting juiced about this. “It could be evidence of a cover-up.”

  Joe throws cold water on that notion. “Or the connection could be bad, or most likely, the caller didn’t want to be involved.”

  He has his finger on the pulse there. People don’t want to get involved. It’s a hassle. You waste your time talking to the police, maybe have to give up a day’s work to testify in a trial. It is also scary, because what if the criminal you fingered comes after you? We have all heard horror stories about witnesses becoming victims themselves. Better to emulate the three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. A hands-off attitude that even extends to people who have had family members murdered by gangs. This is how we have come to live today—we are not our brothers’ keepers.

  “But it does support the possibility that there’s a conspiracy here,” I insist, like a dog chewing on a meatless bone but out of instinct won’t let go. “Some bozo, who shall forever remain nameless and faceless, happens to see Salazar’s truck parked on the street at six in the freaking morning and calls the police to report it. And they take it seriously enough to send someone to check it out? Isn’t that pushing it?”

  Joe isn’t biting. “Another victim had just been found. The cops were on a hair trigger. We can’t chase after this, Jessica. The jury won’t bite on it. It could work against us.”

  He’s right—but still, this tickles the back of my brain. Who was out there at that hour of the morning, saw the truck, and called the police? Whoever it was could not have known there had been another murder, so there was no linkage.

  Unless, of course, there really is a conspiracy, and the caller was the real killer.

  Enough of this, Jessica, I warn myself. Stop thinking about this crazy shit. If we follow up this theory, we would wind up digging a dry hole, and using up precious energy.

  Okay, I suppose if you canvassed the neighborhood for blocks around, you might come up with something, but we don’t have the time, resources, or energy to chase after such flimsy leads. The call was made, the truck was searched, the panties were found. Those are the facts. We have to deal with the facts.

  Cheryl Lynn Steinmetz was single. She lived in a rented condo in Brentwood with a roommate, a college friend named Sasha Koontz, who is now sitting in the witness box, testifying for the prosecution. She’s another one of their witnesses who is gilding the lily, to show how thorough and intense their investigation was.

  Meg Rawlings is at the podium. “Tell us what happened on the morning of Cheryl Lynn’s murder,” she says. Her voice is calm and mellow, one woman being nice to another.

  The witness’s voice quivers with nervous vibrato. “Lieutenant Cordova came to our house. It was early, he woke me up. He wanted to know when the last time was that I had seen Cheryl. I told him that she had gone out after dinner and that I had gone to bed before she’d come home. I thought she was having an affair that she didn’t want me to know about, so I didn’t ask her where she was going or who she was seeing. I didn’t even know she hadn’t come home. Then he told me she had had an accident, and he had to notify her relatives. Next of kin, I think he said.”

  “An accident,” Meg interrupts. “Not that she had been killed?”

  Sasha Koontz shudders. “Not then. I think he wanted to tell her parents first.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “I gave him Cheryl’s mother’s phone number. Then he asked if he could look into her room. He wasn’t in there long, a minute or so. Before he left he gave me his card, and told me he would be back in touch with me after he had talked to Cheryl’s mother.”

  “And that was it?”

  The young woman, who is obviously scared about being here, nods. “He called me back later to tell me that he had talked to Cheryl’s family.” Tears well in the woman’s eyes. “And that Cheryl was dead, that she had been killed.”

  She breaks into full-blown tears, and Meg hands her a tissue. She dabs at her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she apologizes in a small voice. “I still have nightmares about that night.”

  “I understand,” Meg says sympathetically. “You don’t have to apologize for that.” Turning to the bench, she tells Judge Suzuki that she has no more questions.

  I take a pass. There is nothing I can gain by questioning this poor woman. Her raw emotion is terrible to see. Get her off the stand and out of the jury’s eyes. “No questions for this witness at this time, Your Honor,” I announce from our table.

  We break for lunch. Coming up this afternoon and tomorrow, the prosecution’s two star witnesses: Lieutenant Luis Cordova, head of the Full Moon Task Force, which found and arrested the city’s most feared and notorious killer since Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, and the eyewitness who picked Salazar out of a lineup as the man she saw with the last victim right before she was killed.

  If I weren’t pregnant, I’d skip lunch, because the prospect of these two coming up, who will be good, strong witnesses against us, has dampened my appetite; but the baby is moving inside me, and I have to nourish her. I’ve stopped doing the girl/boy thing in my head. Unless I give birth to a boy, I’m thinking of it as a girl. A woman, like me.

  I join Joe in his office. Lunch is takeout from the cafeteria downstairs. A salad and yogurt for me, pastrami on rye and cream soda for him. He wolfs down his sandwich, finishing the last bite with a satisfied burp. He doesn’t have a queasy stomach in anticipation of th
e ass kicking we’re about to get, as I do.

  “Who’s going to do who?” he asks me, referring to the two key witnesses. We’re both prepared to cross-examine either one, so the choice doesn’t matter. What matters to me is that from the very beginning, Joe has treated me as an absolute equal.

  “I’d rather you take Cordova,” I request. Joe knows about my nocturnal encounters with Cordova when I was out late at night, training for my marathon. “I think it would be cleaner.”

  “Fine. You’ll take the eyewitness. Man against man, woman versus woman. Nice symmetry.” He finishes his cream soda, takes the ubiquitous Diet Coke from his fridge, and sucks down half the can in one swallow. “This is why we tolerate all the bullshit, Jessica. For times like this.” He finishes the Diet Coke, and smiles. “Let’s get ready to rummmmble!” he bellows, as if he’s announcing a championship fight in Vegas.

  Two gladiators primed for battle, we pick up our briefcases and head down to the courtroom.

  THIRTY-SIX

  THE TIME FOR UNDERLINGS growing and learning is over. Loomis will ride this horse to the finish line. “Tell us, Lieutenant Cordova, about the events that led to the arrest of the accused, Roberto Salazar, for the murder of Cheryl Lynn Steinmetz.”

  Cordova goes over everything in painstaking and convincing detail, prompted every so often by a fat one down the middle tossed by Loomis. By the time he finishes, it’s four-thirty, so Judge Suzuki calls it a day. Cross-examination will start in the morning.

  Joe and I both scribbled copious notes while Cordova was talking, which we will pore over tonight to see if there are any discrepancies in his testimony in comparison with his previous statements about the murders. We will also burn a few bucks out of petty cash to get an expedited court reporter’s transcript. Cordova sounded airtight to me; he’s been prepped for months. He and the eyewitness are the essentials of their case, along with the recovered panties. He had to be infallible, as will she. But there are always differences between now and then, small shadings that can be exploited, if you can find them. And if they matter. Usually, they don’t. But you keep looking.