Interest of Justice

by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

  Lara bent down and was starting to make notes on a yellow pad when she noticed that Phillip was still standing in front of her desk, a strange expression on his face. “Yes?” Lara said.

  “I-I never realized you had a sister until the police called the day of the murders.”

  “Well, we weren’t very close. Not in recent years.”

  “You look…I…” The young man’s face turned parchment white. “I’m sorry. I’ll make those phone calls now.”

  Before Lara could continue the conversation, Phillip went out of the room and closed the door behind him. He was an extremely private person. Sometimes she wondered about him, about his social life. Today he looked awful, as if he were the one who had lost a loved one. Maybe he had, she thought, shaking her head. Possibly he had lost someone recently and had kept it to himself.

  She had no earthly idea what she should do about Sam Perkins. Ivory had never mentioned family of any kind, but someone would probably come crawling out of the woodwork in the next day or two, thinking they would be inheriting a going business with the pawnshop. Thank God, she thought, she had insisted on her name on the title. Even if the business was shit, she’d have some means of covering her loss. She’d sell the damn building.

  As to Sam, she’d just let him sit in a meat locker until some of his own clan claimed him. After what he’d done to Ivory, she gave thought to calling one of those cheap cremation places, where they charge only a few hundred bucks. If no one surfaced to claim him, she decided, he was on his way to the flames.

  She went through the files on her desk and found those on the morning calendar were gone. Evergreen must have taken them. She wondered how long it had been since the old goat had handled the felony arraignment calendar. The position required some preparation but not much. Most of the day was consumed with the parties entering pleas, setting matters over for trial. The bail reviews required some judicial renderings, and she always read the reports generated by the probation department outlining the defendant’s criminal history, if any, and at least scanned the police reports on the crime. Releasing someone into the community was a significant decision. Not only did a judge have to weigh the factors indicating whether or not the defendant would flee, but they had to determine the risk of recidivism. And the victim’s safety had to be considered. In violent offenses this was particularly germane. Sometimes while suspects were pending prosecution, they went back and finished the job, actually killing someone. Lara made every attempt to keep violent or sex offenders in custody pending trial, even if she had to put her neck on the line to do it.

  Most of the cases scheduled for that day she had already reviewed. She took out each file scheduled for the afternoon session and made detailed notes to Evergreen. Then she called Phillip and had him carry them to the court.

  Alone in her chambers, she relished the cloistered privilege of her position. No one walked in unannounced except other judges, sometimes a D. A. Today, of all days, this mattered. She glanced at the lights on the phones and saw they were all blinking. The bell was turned off in her chambers. When Phillip was busy, the main reception center picked up the excess calls. In her hands were at least twenty pink message slips. She shuffled through them.

  Irene had returned her call from the night before. She’d obviously heard the news by now. Lara tossed that slip in the trash, thinking she’d call her tonight or try to catch her in recess before she left the building.

  Most of the other callers were condolences and offers to help. Benjamin had called and left a number at a hotel in San Francisco. She placed that one in her purse. The others she read, committed the names to memory, those who had taken the time to call, and then tossed them too. Nolan had called. Probably because she made the papers. Press. He loved it. If she’d thought of that aspect, he might have actually come last night. He liked that kind of thing. It was Hollywood, right up his alley. His message she didn’t simply toss. She took the time to rip it up. It made her feel better.

  She hit the intercom and Phillip answered. “I’m speaking with the funeral home now. They’re on hold. The casket’s going to run at least fifteen thousand or it won’t be waterproof.”

  She’d been through this before. She’d buried her father and mother. She had made all the arrangements when Charley was killed. She knew all the scams and sales techniques in the most unscrupulous industry in the universe. “Tell the guy I don’t care if it’s watertight. She’s dead. She can’t drown. Ten thousand and not a penny more.

  “Fine,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “No,” she said, the word barley audible.

  As soon as the light went off, Lara called Phillip back on the intercom and asked him to send for the Henderson file. She wanted him to give Rickerson the name and address of the boyfriend who had threatened her, let him track the kid down, find out where he was yesterday. She had to put some of this fear to rest or she would lose her mind, and she wanted to move out of the condo and back into the house. She couldn’t spend that many more nights on that sofa.

  Her mind kept returning to Ivory and the photos she’d seen. What her poor sister had been made to do. She couldn’t bear to think of it. Sam must have coerced her into prostituting herself just as he coerced her into asking Lara for money. She felt like taking a match and cremating the bastard herself.

  It was the only explanation, she told herself. Ivory certainly didn’t think this one up by herself. It had slimy Sam stamped all over it. Of course, even before she’d met Sam, Ivory had been drinking and experimenting with cocaine. “It makes me feel so good,” she had told Lara. “It makes me feel smart and confident. I’ve never felt that way in my whole life.” Maybe having men pay her for sex made Ivory feel powerful and confident too. Possibly she actually enjoyed whipping them and degrading them.

  Lara felt like taking every single paper and file off her desk and hurling it at the wall. Why hadn’t she seen it? Why hadn’t she stopped it? She was her sister and she was a goddamn judge. Wasn’t she supposed to be intuitive and observant? Hadn’t she seen what was happening to her own flesh and blood? The night Ivory had come to her house, she was dressed like a streetwalker.

  Lara suddenly found herself gulping air. Quickly she spun her chair around to face her great-grandfather’s portrait. When she was little, her grandfather used to come and visit and tell her stories about the past, about her ancestors. Not from history books had she learned how white men had taken away their precious land and moved them to reservations. She had learned these things as a tiny child sitting at her grandfather’s feet, listening to him drone on and on in his deep voice, her eyes locked on his leathery skin. The one thing she had learned early in life was that a person sometimes had to accept the unacceptable.

  It was time to get Josh and leave before people started trying to get in to see her and shower her with sympathy. Besides, she had to get him to a psychologist and start checking into schools. If he hadn’t killed Sam, or anyone else, he was going to need therapy to get through this. If he had to live with her, which she was fairly certain was going to be the case, then he’d probably need a shrink until she packed him off to college. She didn’t know if she had what it took to raise a teenager. It was going to be a long, long haul.

  Then a thought flashed in her mind: boarding school. Perfect. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. Not now, she thought, passing Phillip, still on the phone, and heading down the carpeted corridor to the law library, but soon. As soon as the psychologist thought he was ready. At least with this thought in mind, she could see an end in sight. She doubted if he wanted to be with her anyway.

  “Let’s go, Josh,” she said softly. He wasn’t reading magazines. He was just sitting there staring into space.

  Under the right circumstances, he might even be a nice companion, Lara thought as they headed down the hall. What he needed was stability, structure. He needed hot meals on the table, someone waiting when he got home from school, someone to wash and iron his clothes.
Lara just didn’t have the time, and unfortunately, she didn’t have the inclination. What did she possibly know about raising a teenage boy? Nothing, absolutely nothing.

  Again her eyes drifted to the shaggy-haired young man walking next to her. He didn’t cry, he didn’t complain much, he didn’t say much. He seemed to like junk food. If she could find a man like him, she might consider getting married again.

  They entered the security level, and he pushed the button for the garage. “What’re we going to do now?” he said.

  “We’re going to go home and arrange for you to see a doctor, a psychologist. Someone you can talk to. And I’m going to stop off and buy a portable cellular phone.”

  “No way,” he said, his face frozen into hard lines. “I’m not going to some crazy person’s doctor.”

  Lara was five-three in her stocking feet. She never wore heels. Josh was looking down on her inside the small space of the elevator. “Well, you have to go,” she told him. “I’m not that good of a listener. You need to talk this out. Who knows, maybe I do too. Maybe we’ll both go.” It was a tactic. She could see immediately that it wasn’t going to work.

  “You’re not going,” he snapped. “You’re just saying that to get me to go. Right?”

  “Right. Pretty astute there, kid,” she said and brought forth a weak smile. “But I might, let me tell you.” The elevator doors opened and they headed to her car.

  “Can I drive?” he asked, his voice echoing in the underground garage. “I can drive, you know. Sometimes Mom lets me drive to the store and back for things like milk.”

  Both of them froze. He’d used the present tense. These were the kinds of things that took getting used to. They were like nails in a coffin. They just kept on pounding at you long after the person was gone. She knew. He started sniffing and breathing heavy. Lara didn’t know what to do or say, but she couldn’t let him continue. If the boy broke down, she’d break down with him. She handed him the car keys. “Drive.” Then she narrowed her eyes and peered up at him. ‘Were you telling me the truth? You really know how to drive a car? If you don’t, we’ll get killed.”

  For the first time she saw her sister’s son smile. She felt like she’d won a Nobel prize. It didn’t really matter if they got killed, she thought. What mattered was that he smiled.

  They went careening out of the underground parking tunnel, barely missing the concrete wall. Lara almost wet her pants, but she didn’t. Instead she checked her seat belt and gripped the dashboard, preparing herself for the impact—if not the wall, the way he was driving, they were going to hit something. And they were going to hit it with the most extravagant possession Lara had: the Jaguar, her pride and joy. The smile on Josh’s face was enormous. He was sitting up close to the steering wheel and licking his lips with excitement.

  “A Jaguar…I can’t believe I’m driving a Jaguar. Man, wait till my friends hear about this. How much does a car like this cost?”

  So what if he bashed in the Jaguar? Lara thought. She was insured, maybe not for an unlicensed driver, but right now she didn’t care. It was only a car, an expensive collection of metal and glass and chrome. And sometimes rules had to be broken, exceptions made. Just keep smiling, she said to herself, glancing at him. Just keep smiling, kid, and we’ll get through this and make our way to the other side.

  Chapter 10

  About two blocks from the government center, Lara asked Josh to pull to the side of the road and let her drive. He’d run a red light and almost had a head-on collision.

  “Why are you living in that place?” he asked her. “There’s nothing in there at all. I thought you had a house or something.”

  “I do,” Lara said. She certainly didn’t want to scare the kid to death, tell him someone might be stalking her after what he’d been through. She cleared her throat, preparing herself to lie. “See, Josh, they’re doing some remodeling at my house, so I rented the condo. It was close to the court.”

  He was silent. That took care of that. The car phone rang and she let Josh answer it. It was Rickerson. He handed her the phone.

  “Thought I would just touch base with you. We’re going through the pawnshop tickets now. Then we’re going to start on his books.”

  She wanted to ask about the autopsy, find out if it had been completed yet and the findings, but it wasn’t the type of thing to discuss in front of Josh. “Call me later this evening when you’ve talked to the M.E. What about prints?” Josh wasn’t paying attention anyway. He was staring out the window. The smile had been a momentary thing.

  “Lab’s working on it as we speak. We lifted all kinds of prints, but who knows who they belong to…I wanted to point something else out to you. There was no forced entry, remember? That means that either the killer or killers were inside the house to begin with, or they were known to the victims and were allowed to enter. Don’t you think that rules out someone Perkins made a loan to here at the pawnshop? Just doesn’t make sense that they’d open the door to someone like that and let them walk right into their house.”

  “Look, Rickerson, Ted…you already told me that last night. Aren’t you the man who informed me that we had to cover all the bases? I want every single pawn ticket checked out.”

  “There’s got to be at least a thousand of these tickets. Some of them go back a number of years. We’re only going to follow through on the ones going back six months or so, or we’ll be here digging through this shit forever. And we’re in the process of tracking down all the phone records.”

  Lara glanced at Josh and gripped the phone, steering the car with her other hand. “Well, then I guess you’ll be busy. Don’t you agree that we should pursue this at least? The pawnshop.”

  “Lara,” he answered, a touch of sarcasm in his husky voice, “you seem to think there are hundreds of officers available to sift through this stuff. There’s three of us right now. I’m trying to round up more men, but we can’t produce what we just don’t have. If we get another serious case in this city, there’ll be two of us, and then as time goes on, there’ll only be me. We also have to get over to the house again and comb the neighborhood looking for evidence the killer could have discarded, like bloody clothes—”

  “Tell you what. You have someone box up the pawn tickets and bring them to my condo. I’ll personally start going through them in the next few days, and your people can work on the phone records. Let’s trace every call from that house and give me a list of the names after you run them through the system for wants and warrants.”

  Josh was tugging on her sleeve. ik Ask them to bring my bike, okay?”

  She looked at him and felt her heart melt. All he had of his old life right now was a few clothes. His parents were dead, his home was a shambles, and he was stuck with a woman he hardly knew. “Forget that, Rickerson. I’ll come and get the pawn tickets myself. But do me a favor, okay? Go to the house and get the kid’s bike and meet me at the pawnshop in San Clemente. I’ll be there in about forty minutes.”

  She could hear Rickerson breathing. He didn’t answer. The breathing was loud. She started to hang up when he finally spoke. “I can’t release evidence in a homicide.”

  “Let’s set things straight right now, Rickerson. I more or less own the pawnshop. My name’s right on the deed of trust. I provided the funding for them to buy it. You’ve got to make a decision here. Are those pawn tickets valuable evidence or merely pawn tickets? You seem to think they’re merely pawn tickets and that the whole thing is a waste of time. I’m offering to give you a hand.”

  “I’ll get the bike,” he said. “And Lara, let me tell you something, you need to get that boy to a shrink right away. Don’t wait. I’m telling you. That boy needs treatment.”

  Lara glanced at Josh again. At least the detective had expressed a genuine concern. She appreciated that. “Oh,” she said, “did Phillip call you with the information on the Henderson case?…You know, what we discussed last night?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got a man trying t
o track him down now. Once we find him, I’ll interview him.” With that, he hung up.

  Rickerson was right. She’d have to find a psychologist for Josh today. She slipped onto the freeway and, for the third time in less than two days, headed to San Clemente. She wondered about Josh’s friends, his school work, reestablishing his life, but it was too early for that. Now they had to tread water and deal with the sorrow, the funeral, the black days ahead of them—days Lara knew would get worse before they got better. The awful truth that his mother had been murdered would start to sink all the way to the bone soon enough. Lara already felt it coming. Her own subconscious was packed with reality as sharp as a machete, about to slice its way into her every thought and cut her heart into ribbons.

  “Isn’t that the exit to San Clemente?” Josh said, looking out the window. “You just passed it.”

  “Oh,” Lara said, lost in her thoughts. “I’ll take the next exit.”

  “You’re going to miss this exit too,” Josh said, all excited. “Hurry, get in the right-hand lane.”

  They were soon on the city streets, approaching the pawnshop. Lara felt tears gathering in her eyes and bit the inside of her mouth. If a person could only rewrite history knowing what was ahead, more or less stop the wheels of life from turning the wrong way. But of course, that wasn’t reality. A child with no parents, she thought, glancing at Josh, Ivory’s body in a tiled autopsy room—that was reality.

  First they lugged the two huge boxes to the condo filled with records from the pawnshop, and then Lara sent Josh back down to bring his bike up from the trunk of the car. Lara took out the portable phone she had purchased and called Irene Murdock. She caught her in recess.

  “Lara, darling,” Irene said, “I’ve been frantic. I’ve been calling your house since I heard this on the news. Are you all right? Your sister and brother-in-law. How horrid.”

  “I guess you’ve heard it all by now,” Lara said, collapsing on the sofa.