Interest of Justice

by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

  “Maybe.” His voice was small. He wouldn’t look at her.

  They drove in silence to the foster home, both of them lost in their thoughts. Once she had pulled up at the curb, she reached into her purse and handed Josh a pen and a piece of paper. “I’m going to take a walk. Write down what happened and leave it on the seat. I promise I won’t read it until you’re in the house. Deal?”

  She didn’t wait for a response. She walked down the sidewalk and crossed the street. As soon as she saw Josh get out of the car and go into the house, she returned to the car. She looked but there was nothing there. Thinking it had fallen between the seats, she went to the other side of the car and opened the passenger door and searched for it. She glanced back at the house and saw Josh looking at her through the window. After standing there a few minutes, Lara left.

  The first thing she did was call Emmet. “Did you get the blood type on the T-shirt?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I was…trying to…find you. It’s type AB.”

  Lara pulled to the side of the road and put her hand over her chest. “Thank God, Emmet. I really appreciate this. I’m not certain why his blood was there, what he did to himself, but I guess it’s all right. I mean, it’s his blood type.”

  “Unless,” Emmet struggled to say, “your brother-in-law…has…AB as well. Not likely…though. Only about four percent…of the…population has type AB blood.”

  “I’ll find out, Emmet. And listen, thanks. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” She rushed back to the condo. The place was a shambles, but at least he had found someone to handle the move on the weekend. Poor Emmet, she thought, heading across the courtyard to his door.

  He was sitting in his office working.

  “Are you all right?” she said. ‘This move was a bigger job than I thought it was.”

  “Fine,” he typed. “I’m leaving my office the way it is. Look in the bedrooms. See if they put everything where you want it.”

  Lara checked and saw all the bedroom furniture from the model in one room and the other was as Emmet had left it. Emmet had left his computer equipment in both rooms, and the movers had placed all her clothes and things on top of them.

  She went back in and hugged Emmet from behind. “I can never repay you for this. Never. No one’s ever done something this nice for me before.”

  He didn’t turn around, but words flashed on the screen as he typed. “Most people are jerks. I’m not.”

  Lara laughed. “You got the phone line in and everything?”

  “Yes,” he typed. “I had a modem installed yesterday. I seldom use the telephone. Oh,” he continued typing, “if you want, you can talk to me that way. Just come in here and follow the instructions on this sheet. We can talk on the bulletin board. I have a lot of friends I talk to all the time. When they send me a message, a bell rings on my console.”

  Lara wheeled Emmet to her place, the chair hard to push on the grass.

  “See?” he said, showing her his bed. He had a tray that moved his laptop computer back and forth from the desk to his bed. That way he could work at night when he couldn’t sleep.

  His nurse would be there shortly, so Lara left, going back across the courtyard. Madeline Murphy had promised they would come by Tuesday and check her new living situation. Then she could get Josh back.

  Only Emmet’s chair was in the living room and an end table with a lamp. It looked empty, stark. Lara sat down. She was completely exhausted. Tomorrow Ivory would go in the ground. Then it would all be real—too real.

  Rickerson called her. A cacophony of noises rang out in the background; Lara wondered where he was calling from.

  “I’d like to see you,” he said. “Discuss some things. Can you meet me at that bar on the corner of Seventeenth and First Street? It’s not far from your house.”

  “I guess,” she said. “I mean, if it’s important.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Before Lara could protest or ask questions, he’d hung up. What now? she thought. Did he want to tell her that she’d released someone else who was out there killing people? Lara felt like chucking it all in, taking Josh and moving to Kansas or something, leaving this whole smelly, disgusting city behind. She grabbed her purse and headed out the front door.

  She beat Rickerson to the bar. It was a dive. She didn’t see his unmarked unit in the parking lot, so she slid down in the seat to wait. She’d wait right here in her car until he arrived, she decided, locking the doors.

  Approximately thirty minutes later, Rickerson drove up as a passenger in a black-and-white patrol car. He stuck his head in the window of the Jaguar and then waved to the officer. The man drove off. “Want to let me in?” he said. Lara unlocked the doors.

  “What’s going on? Why did you want me to meet you here?” Instead of smoking a cigar, the detective was smacking a huge wad of chewing gum. Lara looked at him and sniffed. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Few beers,” he said, his voice slurred. “Chief had a barbecue. Left my car over there. Caught a ride.”

  “Want to tell me why I’m here?”

  “Your sister’s trick book. We got it.”

  Lara gave him a questioning look.

  “You know, every working girl has a book where she keeps information on her clients. We’ve been looking for it. Somehow we missed it. It was in her car under the mat. Some fool just booked it into evidence. I was poking through the stuff and found it today. It might be good.”

  “Well…”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Have to check it out. Right now most of the numbers we already have, but you never know. One might be promising—a woman, probably another prostitute. Tried to find her, but she must be out working.”

  The space inside the front seat of the Jaguar was actually very small. For some reason Lara felt funny sitting here with the big detective in the dark with only a swatch of light drifting in from the bar. He was almost larger than life, and the air was thick with his very presence.

  “Is that all?”

  Rickerson’s red hair was standing straight up. A fierce wind had picked up in the past thirty minutes, and he had his jacket collar turned up as well. They weren’t that far from the ocean and Lara could smell the salty sea air.

  “I think Evergreen is behind all this—that he contracted to have your sister and brother-in-law killed.”

  “Not this again,” Lara said, frowning. “Leo Evergreen contracted to have my sister and Sam killed?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Look, I’ve got to go inside. I need a bathroom.” He glanced at her. It was obvious that he’d had more than a few beers. He was smashed.

  “You’re drunk,” she said, disgusted. “I can’t believe you called me out tonight to continue this ridiculous line of supposition—that the presiding judge of Orange County is contracting murders? What are you going to tell me next, that Mother Teresa is stealing money from orphans or the Martians are landing? Sober up, Rickerson. Go home.” She started to turn the key in the ignition.

  “I have to go,” he insisted, reaching for the door handle. “I have to take a leak.”

  “Well, I’m going home,” Lara shot at him.

  “I’d like to talk to you. You want me to go behind a bush or something? The beer…” He belched, a hand over his stomach.

  “My place?” she said flatly.

  “Better make it fast,” he answered.

  Lara was staring at the road in front of her, her mind reeling. Rickerson was trying to talk fast through the fog of alcohol, his words almost running together like a foreign language, trying to explain to her how he had arrived at this assumption. Suddenly he yelled at her to stop the car and got out without a word and disappeared behind a building. A few minutes later, he returned. “Sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t wait.”

  Lara burned inside again. “Leo Evergreen a pedophile? He’s an asshole, but a pedophile, a child molester? Never. I can’t believe it. You’re out of your mind, Ted. You’ve had t
oo much to drink. Besides, he was married. He even had a child. You saw his picture today.”

  “Right,” he said, inching his way toward sobriety with every passing second. “Thought you judges knew everything. Since when do pedophiles never marry and have children? You know, this is something that can surface any time in their life. It’s not like the color of their hair or something they’re born with. It’s a sickness.”

  “Sure, and Ivory was seeing Leo? Ivory stole these pictures of Leo with little boys? Sure. All of this is a stretch.” She craned her neck around to look at him. “And I mean a real stretch of the imagination. What possible proof do you have to support this preposterous claim?”

  They pulled into the complex and parked. It was a lousy parking job. Lara had the front wheels of the Jaguar up over the curb. “I’m living over here now,” she told him, slamming the car door, not bothering to lock it. “I had to move because of Josh. The social workers wouldn’t let him stay with me if I didn’t move.”

  Rickerson ignored her and walked behind her to the door.

  She stopped on the sidewalk. “What evidence do you have? Are you going to tell me, or still keep me in the dark? Come in,” she said, unlocking the door.

  Rickerson walked in, looking around, and then flopped in the one chair, leaving Lara standing. Then he jumped back up and told her to sit down. He talked as he paced, slipping his sports jacket off his shoulders and tossing it on the floor. “You got any coffee in this place?” he said, looking around. Underneath his jacket he was wearing a blue knit shirt and casual slacks. The fabric was flat over his abdomen, then strained to cover his bulging biceps. In the neck of his shirt were tufts of strawberry blond hair. He took out a cigar and then put it back in his pocket and started working his jaws on the gum.

  “I’ll make some,” Lara said, going to Emmet’s kitchen and trying to find the coffee in the cabinet. Rickerson was still talking.

  “Here’s what I have,” he said. “The lab enlarged and enhanced the Polaroids I told you we found at the house. There was a reflection in the mirror of another photo of a woman and a young man. I think it’s Evergreen’s wife and son. They’re working to verify this as we speak. That’s why I took the picture off his desk. If it looks good, then we’ll find his son and talk to him, make certain it’s him. His wife is dead. I saw her death certificate in his file cabinet. She died about five years ago.”

  The coffee was brewing, filling the small rooms with its fragrant aroma. One of those gourmet coffees, it smelled like cinnamon. She took a seat in the chair. “I’m certainly listening. Keep going.”

  “We found over forty grand in cash in the safe at the pawnshop. Does that smack of extortion to you?”

  Lara blinked at the amount. “Forty thousand dollars? You’re kidding. Sam couldn’t amass that kind of money in a hundred years. You might be right on the blackmail, but I don’t see how this implicates Evergreen.”

  Rickerson gave Lara a sidelong glance and then continued to pace. “We’re going through Evergreen’s cancelled checks, his bank statements, looking for the payout. In addition, every month Evergreen writes a check for a thousand dollars to Miramar Properties. He also writes checks to a mortgage company that I assume are his house. We checked and Miramar owns and operates apartment complexes. We couldn’t contact anyone in their office today, but my guess is that Evergreen has a secret pad somewhere. That’s where he met your sister for their little rendezvous and probably where he takes the kids he molests.”

  “Shit,” Lara said, shaking her head. “You’re crazy. He probably pays his son’s rent or something. I can’t believe any of this, can’t believe you’re wasting your time with this.”

  Rickerson stopped pacing and looked at her. “I think Evergreen killed Cummings. I think he’s desperate now. Cummings wasn’t working for any law enforcement agency we can find. Evergreen was lying or someone else inside the system arranged Packy’s release. Any way you look at it, it comes back to someone with access to inmate information.”

  Lara’s mouth fell open and her face was ashen, almost as gray as the upholstery on the chair. For a few moments she couldn’t get her mouth to work. She opened it, closed it, opened it again. He was right. Anyone at the courthouse, even Phillip, could have pulled up Cummings’s rap sheet and booking information on the computer and then simply called Evergreen and conned him into believing they were police officers. Lara herself had been contacted by local officers asking for special handling on cases. She’d never once verified the callers’ identities.

  “Evergreen told me to release Packy Cummings so he could murder my own sister? If this was true, why didn’t he have one of the other judges release the man?

  Why me? He would have been an outright fool to do that…and believe me, Evergreen is no fool.”

  “He didn’t know, Lara,” Rickerson said. “Use your brain. If he was seeing your sister, a prostitute, do you think for a minute she told him about you being a judge or that he would ever in his wildest dreams link the two of you?”

  Lara was silent. At least this made sense even if nothing else did. Maybe the detective wasn’t out of his mind completely. “So, what you’re saying is that he didn’t know we were related. They were blackmailing him and he needed a hit man, a strong arm. He went for this Packy animal for whatever reason and selected me only because I was sitting the arraignment calendar?”

  Rickerson just stood there flicking the hairs on his mustache. “Looks that way.”

  “And I released the man who murdered my sister?” All roads led back to this. Lara knew she was obsessing, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was about to come unglued. “Look, you said it could be anyone in law enforcement, even a clerk. How about my secretary? He knows the system like the back of his hand. Not only that, he’s been getting loans lately, even falsifying his salary. And he’s younger than Evergreen. Maybe he was seeing Ivory. He didn’t know she was my sister. I never mentioned her to anyone at work before her death. We didn’t get along, you know.”

  Rickerson started pacing again. “The man in the photos was an older man, Lara.”

  Lara was silent, thinking. “Maybe Phillip was one of the boys in the photos? You said several young boys were in those pictures and they were taken years ago.”

  Rickerson stopped and locked eyes with Lara. “I’ll check him out, okay? But don’t you think a pedophile has more to lose than a victim? I mean, people don’t normally blackmail victims.”

  “You don’t really understand this type of offense, Ted,” Lara said, leaning forward in her chair. “What makes sexual abuse so insidious is that the victims often feel responsible. The offender convinces them that they incited their advances, even encouraged them. The victims are sometimes more contrite than the offenders.”

  “So you think your secretary should be considered a suspect?”

  “Why not? He’s in law school. If he’d been victimized in the past, he certainly wouldn’t want anyone to know, particularly since you said the boys were having sex with an adult male. Maybe that’s why he’s been applying for all these loans—to come up with the extortion money?”

  “I’ll look into it,” Rickerson said, obviously not enthusiastic. Just because he felt the killer was someone in the system didn’t mean it was Lara’s secretary. “Does Evergreen limp?”

  Lara thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t really say he limps, Ted. He has a distinctive walk, but so do a lot of people.”

  “The lab thinks they can identify the man in the photos due to some kind of physical disability.”

  Lara’s mind wandered and she heard only snatches of what Rickerson was saying. Someone was playing a stereo a few doors down. It sounded like Etta James—a heavy blues tune. Cars were whizzing by on the freeway. If she didn’t listen closely, she could imagine it was the ocean instead of the freeway. She’d let a vicious criminal walk out on the street, and he had killed her own sister. She leaned forward and put her head in her hands, pulling her hair straight out from her
head. “I released him. I released him. I released the very man who murdered my sister.”

  Rickerson stopped pacing and walked to her chair, dropping to his knees and looking her straight in the eye. “Stop this,” he said. “Blaming yourself isn’t going to cure anything.”

  She ignored him. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. All my life I’ve tried to do the right thing. And now I’ve actually caused my sister’s death.”

  Rickerson reached for her, touching the top of her head gently and then drawing it against his shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault. You did what Evergreen told you to do. How could you have possibly known?”

  His voice was soft and low, and he was stroking her hair. She could smell the beer on his breath and the lingering odor of cigars on his clothing, but she could also feel his masculine strength. His body was solid, as hard as a rock. She let him hold her. Then she pulled away and pushed her hair out of her face. For a few moments their eyes met and he probed there—down where it was tangled and dark, a twisted maze of confusion and grief. She was beginning to lean on this man, she thought, allowing him to get close, see a part of her few people saw. She had to stop it. Their relationship was passing the level of friendship, even fantasy. Lara was about to take his hand and lead him to the bedroom. It wasn’t the sex she really wanted. Not now. Right now she just wanted him to hold her, tell her everything was okay, tell her he would protect her.

  “You’re married, huh?” she finally said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Kids?”

  “Two.”

  “Happy?”

  He stood and looked away. If he was going to tell her, he thought, now was the time to do it. But he couldn’t. He didn’t know why, but he simply couldn’t. And what would he tell her? That he was separated. That his wife had walked out on him after nineteen years of marriage. That he might or might not be getting a divorce. She was dating this Benjamin England, a prominent attorney. “Sometimes,” he said softly, “but not always. No one’s happy all the time, Lara. That just isn’t the way it is. There are good days and bad days. You know?”