Judgment Calls

by Alafair Burke

  “Do you want to see pictures of them?” She hopped up from the sofa and disappeared into the back of the house. She returned with a miniature backpack in the shape of a panda bear and fished out two envelopes.

  “I love taking pictures. I don’t have a camera, but we used to, like, pitch in our money to get a disposable one sometimes. We’d take turns carrying it around until the film was gone. It would take awhile for them to actually get developed, since no one ever had enough money. But I took these in last week.”

  She handed the pictures to me one by one, flipping through most of them quickly, explaining that she hadn’t taken them and didn’t know most of the people in them. I tried not to reveal my shock. One group of pictures showed girls in their bras and panties frolicking on the lap of a hard-bodied shirtless man with a tattoo of the Tasmanian Devil on his right pec. The photographs didn’t reveal his face, but he was obviously an adult, and, from the looks of things, he was about as carnivorous as the notoriously frenzied cartoon character emblazoned on his chest.

  “Those were taken when someone else had the camera,” Kendra said, by way of explanation.

  Kendra seemed to have an eye for photography. When she finally got to the three pictures she had taken, I could see that she’d managed to capture a youthful, playful side of these girls that was nowhere to be seen in the other photos. Three of them were sitting outside in Pioneer Square, making funny faces and forming peace signs with their fingers over each other’s heads.

  “That’s my friend Haley,” Kendra said, pointing to an attractive teenage girl who was crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue at the camera. Of Kendra’s friends, she looked the most like a prostitute. I recognized her from the Tasmanian Devil pictures.

  “Kendra, would you mind if I borrowed these pictures?” I sensed that she wanted an explanation. “Chuck and I work with a man named Tommy Garcia. He’s been trying to figure out who’s been making girls like Haley and your other friends give them a portion of their money.”

  After some negotiation, we decided that she’d hang on to the three pictures of her friends and I’d take the rest to Garcia.

  When Kendra went to the kitchen to throw out the empty Happy Meal box, Chuck pulled me aside.

  “I was thinking about the investigation while you two were talking. Kendra told Ray and Jack she’d know the place those guys drove her to if she saw it, but they never took her out. Probably thought it was too much of a long shot. But I want to drive her around a little over there and see if she recognizes anything. We can canvass for witnesses. Maybe someone called in a suspicious car or something. You never know.”

  “Sure, sounds good.” I was surprised that he wanted my input. “You don’t need my permission to do stuff like that.”

  He squinted in mock disbelief. “Don’t flatter yourself, Kincaid. I need you to drive us.”

  It was my turn to feign misgivings. “Something wrong with that ride of yours? Since when do you need me to schlep you around?”

  “Why do you always have to bag on my car? You have to admit, it’s pretty sweet.”

  Chuck loved cars. As long as I’d known him, he had always driven some old car that he had poured his heart, soul, and wallet into to fix. For the last few years, it had been a magnificent ruby-red 1967 Jaguar convertible.

  “You know I love that car. I just think it would look a lot better around someone else. Me, for example.”

  “In your dreams, Kincaid.”

  “So if I can’t have your car, what do you need me and my little Jetta for?”

  “Department GO says we don’t put civilians in our personal vehicles while we’re on the job. I don’t want to go all the way downtown for a duty car. Let’s just take yours.”

  I looked at my watch. It was a quarter after eight. “And what makes you think the DA’s office doesn’t have a general order saying the same thing?”

  “Because you guys don’t need GO’s. Only reason cops have them is to cover our asses now that police are getting sued left and right after Rodney King and Abner Louima. You lawyers are so fucking political, you can CYA without any stupid policies.”

  “Nice language. You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  “No, but I don’t remember you having any problems with it.”

  “Knock it off, or you and that little smirk can drive to Texas alone for all I care.”

  “Leave the tough act for the courthouse. You forget how well I know you. We both know you care, so fish out the keys to that tin can of yours so we can go to work.”

  Once again, I was left yearning for the perfect zinger. I settled for my keys.

  4

  It took some doing to convince Kendra to come with us, but when I explained how helpful she could be, she relented. She paused on the porch as she was pulling the front door shut behind her. “Oh, hold on a sec. I don’t have any house keys. Mom’s supposed to get a new set made at the store tomorrow.”

  I’d forgotten about that. “Can we go by your mom’s work and pick up her keys on the way home?”

  “Um, her boss gets real mad if she does personal stuff at work. I’m not supposed to bug her or anything when she’s there. The store’s a lot nicer.”

  Chuck did a quick overview of the house and came up with a solution. We placed a full cup of water on the floor a few inches in front of the back door, and stuck several pieces of masking tape from the door to the doorframe. We left the door unlocked and walked out of the front door, locking it and pulling it shut behind us on the way out.

  Kendra looked puzzled until Chuck explained that any unusual event at the beginning of a break-in usually spooks the burglar enough that he leaves. In a worst-case scenario, we’d at least know someone had been there when we got back if the water was spilled and the tape unsealed.

  As responsible adults, we should have consulted Kendra’s mother before taking her daughter and leaving her home unlocked. But by now Chuck and I had surmised that this was no typical mother-daughter relationship. If it was OK by Kendra, Andrea Martin would assume it was for the best.

  When she saw the cars parked in front of her house, Kendra had a clear preference. “Cool car! Are we taking it?”

  Her eager look up at me spoke volumes. I turned my head to smile back at Chuck. “I told you it was a chick car.”

  “It’s not a chick car. You know how much power that thing has? She was complimenting you. Probably figured a highbrow lawyer like you would drive something with a little more style.”

  Kendra tried to hide her disappointment. “Your car’s nice too, Miss Kincaid.”

  “Thanks. And you call me Samantha, or I’m going to start calling you Miss Martin.”

  She laughed. “OK, Samantha.”

  Chuck hopped in the backseat so Kendra could ride up front. I headed south and then west on Division, toward southeast Portland. Rockwood was on the outskirts of Portland, straddling the east border of the city and the west border of suburban Gresham. It marked the end of approximately 140 consecutive blocks of east Portland, inhabited by white welfare families who were seldom acknowledged by either the liberal elite who occupy the central core of the city or the more conservative soccer-mom families who make up the suburbs.

  The only landmark Kendra could give me was Reed College. She remembered seeing it while they were driving. The school was located just a few miles southeast of downtown, on Woodstock Boulevard. It was a fitting name for the location. The college was a bastion of leftist politics and had proudly carried the motto ATHEISM, COMMUNISM, AND FREE LOVE since the 1950s. Some student in the eighties had made a mint selling parody T-shirts saying NEW REED: THE MORAL MAJORITY, CAPITALISM, AND SAFE SEX.

  Students arrived on campus looking like regular kids who just got out of high school, but by Thanksgiving they’d all stopped bathing and had torn holes in the L. L. Bean and J. Crew clothing their parents had shipped them off to Oregon with. When I was in high school, the slur “You smell like a Reedie” was used whenever someone got a l
ittle ripe in gym class.

  Although the school was recognized nationally for its stringent academic requirements, Kendra, like most Oregonians, had described it to me as “that hippie school.”

  Chuck was trying to help her narrow our search. “Would you say you stopped pretty soon after you saw the college, or did you see the college closer to the beginning of the drive?”

  “It was maybe a little bit after halfway.”

  “Did they get on a freeway after you saw the college, or did they drive on residential streets?”

  “Well, after, they took the freeway out to where they left me, I guess. But I think they were just driving on regular streets before that.”

  Old Town to Reed College was about a ten-minute drive. If they didn’t get on a freeway or a major arterial, then they hadn’t driven all the way out to the far end of the city. Still, what seemed like a long shot when Chuck thought of it in Rockwood seemed even more ridiculous now that we were in the car.

  We needed more. “Do you remember anything else? Any stores? Gas stations? Strip malls?”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t looking at stuff like that. I just remember driving in front of the college. I looked to see if maybe there were some people walking around who might see me if I tried to get out, but it was really dark.”

  “So if you had passed an open store, do you think you would’ve remembered it?”

  “Um, yeah, I guess. Because I was looking for a place with a bunch of people.”

  “When they stopped, were you near houses? Or was it more industrial?” The police report said that Kendra had described being in a parking lot, but I hadn’t formed an impression of what type of lot.

  “It was a big parking lot, but there weren’t, like, any other cars or anything. And there was, like, one real big building but then nothing else, just like a park or something. But it wasn’t a park I’d ever seen or anything.”

  I was at a loss. I headed toward Reed College until I could think of a better plan.

  “Oh, wait, I remember something. After they stopped, before I tried to run away, I remember I couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other. They were, like, having to yell to talk because a train was going by.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. Portland doesn’t have much in the way of train tracks. There’s the Max, a light rail that’s part of the city’s public transportation. It runs east to west across the entire county on a single track. Then there are the railcar tracks. The east-west tracks are close to the Max rails along Interstate 84. The north-south tracks are roughly adjacent to Highway 99. “Like a Max train or a big train?”

  “Louder than the Max. A big train.”

  The east-west train tracks didn’t seem likely. They were on the north side of the city. I didn’t think Kendra would confuse any neighborhood along the tracks with southeast Portland. But the north-south tracks ran right through close-in southeast Portland, just a half a mile or so west of Reed. There were a few neighborhood parks within earshot of the tracks.

  I drove past Reed College and headed to the Rhododendron Gardens. The front parking lot and small information booth fit Kendra’s description at least roughly. When I pulled into the lot, she said, “No, this isn’t it. It was a bigger lot, and there wasn’t a fence like this. It just went right into the park area and then there was a bigger building.”

  Westmoreland Park had a larger parking lot without a fence, but I didn’t recall any kind of building, and sure enough there wasn’t one.

  “Does this even look like the same neighborhood?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it does. I don’t think I’ve ever been here or anything. But, yeah, it was like this. Like with a lot of trees and stuff. And when we passed houses, they were big like these.”

  We were in the middle of a pocket of upscale houses in southeast Portland. The Sellwood-Moreland neighborhood, like my own in Alameda, was made up of turn-of-the-century homes. It was the most recent central neighborhood to have been taken over and colonized by yuppies. Considered a hippie enclave when I was a kid, the place was now overrun by coffee shops, chichi bakeries, and antiques stores. Area residents now actually golfed at Eastmoreland, a municipal course that rivals many private country clubs.

  Sometimes my disjointed pattern of thought actually pays off. It suddenly dawned on me that the last time I went to Eastmoreland to use its covered driving range, I sliced the hell out of a ball because a train had come barreling by at the top of my backswing. The parking lot is enormous and surrounded by thick hedges on two sides and the golf course on the others.

  I felt a rush, but I tried to hide my excitement. I didn’t want to coach Kendra into a specific answer. I took a few side streets through Westmoreland and then turned into the Eastmoreland lot.

  Kendra knew immediately. If her ID of Derringer had been this solid, I could see why she’d earned Walker’s and Johnson’s confidence.

  “Samantha, this is it. I remember, I remember! That’s the big building, and over there’s the park. Are we near train tracks? This is totally it. They drove me right over there, around the side of the building.”

  I knew that around the corner from the clubhouse, a strip of asphalt led to the driving range. I parked there whenever I came to hit balls, but it had never dawned on me how dangerously isolated the area would be when the course was closed. Acres of greens surrounded the lot on the north, east, and south. To the west, thick hedges, train tracks, and a six-lane freeway separated the parking lot from the nearest house.

  From the backseat, Chuck patted Kendra on the shoulder. “Good memory, kiddo. Good job, Kincaid, for thinking of this place. You two didn’t even need me here.”

  I knew he was attempting to hide his disappointment. The odds of finding a witness were slim. He would check with the golf course in the morning, but he wouldn’t find anything.

  I tried to look on the bright side. At least I could prove that the crime had taken place in Multnomah County, so Derringer couldn’t weasel out on a technical argument over jurisdiction. Also, the golf course was only a few minutes from Derringer’s house, which at least added a piece of circumstantial evidence. At this point, anything helped.

  I decided to drive by Derringer’s apartment before heading back to Rockwood. It would be nice to know the exact distance for trial, and I might as well get it while I was down here.

  I took a right onto Milwaukee Avenue and made a note of my odometer reading. Milwaukee is the primary commercial road running through Sellwood. It was also one of the only places where you’d find low-rent, high-crime apartments in this pocket of southeast Portland.

  Frank Derringer’s apartment building was on Milwaukee and Powell, which I learned was exactly 1.7 miles from the Eastmoreland Golf Club. I pulled into the small parking lot in front of the building, turned on my overhead light, and jotted down the odometer reading on a legal pad I pulled from my briefcase.

  “Sorry for the stop, guys, but I wanted to make sure I made a note in the file about our find at the golf club while it was still fresh in my mind.”

  Chuck realized where we were but didn’t say anything. He apparently agreed there was no need to inform Kendra that we were sitting just a few feet from her assailant’s home. She didn’t seem like the pipe-bomb-building type, but you never can tell.

  I added a short note for the file, summarizing Kendra’s statement at the golf course. As I was returning the pad to my briefcase, Kendra opened her car door, got out, and began walking across the street.

  “Where the hell’s she—”

  Before I could finish the question, Chuck was out of the car too. It wasn’t hard for him to catch up. Kendra stopped by an old tan Buick on the corner across the street from the complex. When I got to where she and Chuck stood, Chuck was saying, “What? What is it? Kendra?”

  Kendra was ignoring him, entranced by this remarkably unexceptional car. Then she said, “He must’ve painted it.”

  “Who? Who painted what?”

  Kendra spoke as if th
inking aloud. “The car. He must’ve painted it. It was dark before. Now it’s tan.”

  “Kendra, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that this is the car. This is the car they pulled me into. I remember it. But it was dark before.”

  Chuck and I traded skeptical looks. This wasn’t good. Witnesses were notoriously bad at identifying cars, especially when, like Kendra, they knew nothing about them. And this particular identification seemed especially suspect, given that the car was an entirely different color from what Kendra had described after the attack.

  The viability of the case against Derringer rose or fell on Kendra Martin’s credibility. Not just her honesty but also her memory would be the key to convincing a jury to believe her testimony. If Kendra made an assertion of fact that we later determined to be incorrect, I would have an ethical obligation to tell Lisa Lopez about the mistake. The case would be over.

  A couple of years ago, I had a robbery case where the clerk described the robber with as much detail as if he had been looking right at him. The cops picked up the defendant just a few blocks away, sitting at a bus stop where someone happened to have stuffed a sack full of marked bills behind a nearby bush. The man matched the teller’s description in every way, except his tie was blue and not green.

  A lazy cop could have written a report saying the teller gave a verbal description, the defendant fit that description, and the teller then ID’d the guy in a line-up. Open and shut. But the rookie on the robbery had been fastidious, submitting a detailed fifteen-page report. The defense lawyer cross-examined the teller for four hours, and three jurors eventually voted not guilty, leaving me with a hung jury. My guess is that the eager officer now has a habit of glossing over certain facts in his reports.

  How much Chuck Forbes lets slide in his reports I didn’t know, but the point was moot. I was standing right here, falling into the hole that Kendra Martin was digging deeper with her every word. The line between changing her statement and leading the investigation would be thin. Chuck and I needed to be sure to stay on the right side of it.