Staying Cool

by Catherine Todd

  Staying Cool

  Catherine Todd

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1997 by Catherine Todd

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition June 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-901-6

  Also by Catherine Todd

  Secret Lives of Second Wives

  Exit Strategies

  Making Waves

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Ellen Edwards for her excellent suggestions for improving this manuscript and for the time she put into working with me. She is a fine editor and a true reader’s advocate.

  I would also like to thank my agent, Denise Marcil, not only for her enthusiastic representation but also for her encouragement and editorial advice above and beyond the norm. I have been very fortunate in both my editor and my agent.

  Thanks to all the people at Avon Books for their part in the publication of Staying Cool, including most particularly Micki Nuding, Assistant Editor. Thanks to my copy editor, Kate Liba; the art director, Tom Egner; the sales and marketing departments; and the representatives on the road.

  Ken Hackleman very kindly provided background information on visiting procedures at the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi. Any errors, adaptations, or fictional license with the facts are entirely my own.

  1

  Ambiguity got no respect in the Jury Room.

  There were no shades of gray, no “maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t.”

  “It’s cut and dried,” said Leo, the foreman.

  I was leaning forward attentively, more out of politeness than necessity. I hadn’t been cooped up with him for days for nothing; I had already guessed how he was going to vote.

  The fluorescent light cruelly illuminated the knobby ridge of his pate, despite what had obviously been painstaking efforts to conceal it with hair combed over from one side of his head. His face shone with sweat and a measured enthusiasm. He sold insurance.

  Under the circumstances, “cut and dried” was probably not the most tasteful expression to have used, but he did have a point. The state had put on a convincing case against the defendant—Jesus Ramon Garcia—and the Jury Room held an air of conviction.

  Leo let his words hang in the air a minute and then turned to the rest of us for confirmation. That had been his pattern throughout the period of our unnatural intimacy: first bluster, then a pause for approval.

  Next to him, Hazel, an elderly housewife, nodded agreement slowly. She was very sincere, the sort of retired person who likes to serve on juries because it is “interesting.” She had confided to me at the beginning of our service that she owned a very valuable thimble collection. She’d invited me to come and see it when “this was over.” I’d said I would.

  “If you mean,” she said precisely, “that Mr. Garcia appears to be guilty, I’d have to agree. But—”

  “What do you think, Alvino?” Leo interrupted. Every man on the jury interrupted every woman on the jury whenever he felt like it. Maybe it was a Deborah Tannen thing, because the men never seemed to notice they were doing it, and, of course, the women were too chicken to bring it up. It was bad enough to be confined with a group of strangers day after day without picking fights over nonessentials.

  Alvino Louis owned a very successful exotic car agency in San Pedro. He was black and lived in Palos Verdes, haven of the affluent and gentrified. He had more than once expressed his determination to “get this over with” as soon as possible, although he had promised to give his fellow jurors a “good deal” on a car if we stopped by afterward. He usually exhibited a salesman’s buoyancy, but today he looked grim. I suppose we all did.

  He glanced at his watch, then back at Leo. “Guilty.” He rolled his eyes. “The dumb bastard.”

  “Marta?” Leo asked.

  We all looked at her. Marta was the only one who came close to fulfilling the “jury of his peers” requirement in that she was a pleasant, grandmotherly Latina from a part of town not generally distinguished by its prosperity. That hardly made her the peer of an eighteen-year-old punk with a juvenile record as long as the phone book, but the counsel for the defense had fought to keep her on the panel, as much as he had fought for anything. A court-appointed attorney for an indigent defendant could hardly be expected to muster the enthusiasm or the resources to mount an all-out attack on the prosecution’s case, especially given the weight of the evidence and the unfortunate air of undesirability that hung about his client. He did his best, but he had the hangdog aura of a predetermined loser.

  Marta appeared uncomfortable under the scrutiny. She ran her hands over the edge of the Formica table. It was dark brown, like the paneled walls. It was not a room for levity. “I don’t know,” she said heavily. “I think…I think he is not so bad a boy as he wants everyone to believe.” She shook her head. “But there is so much evidence. The police…the weapon, everything.” She sighed.

  “Does that mean you think he did it?” Alvino asked impatiently. Leo glared at him.

  Marta nodded. “I guess so.”

  “It” was bashing in the head of a prominent Westside businesswoman when she (presumably) discovered the defendant burglarizing her office. The weapon was an Erté statue—a female figure with elongated, outstretched arms and dressed in a romanticized twentieth-century version of Egyptian costume.

  In most of the crime novels I’d read, the lawyers seemed to spend a lot of time on the victim’s life. The prosecution wants to do it so the jury has some emotional involvement with the dead person; the defense is looking for something that lets their guy off the hook. One of the troubles with having read a lot of Patterson or Turow or Grisham is that, when you end up on a jury, you see how you’re being manipulated, or at least you think you do. No one asks you about your taste in fiction when they’re doing voir dire (except perhaps in the OJ case, where they asked everything), but maybe they should.

  Still, in this case, the victim was almost more mysterious than the crime. Natasha Ivanova was a fortyish Russian émigré who ran a very exclusive matchmaking (as opposed to dating) service. This was not, her assistant and heir apparent had stressed on the stand, one of those tacky organizations that—she’d visibly shuddered—sent out direct mail solicitations and questionnaires about “lifestyles” and “compatibility.” This was a service selecting appropriate spousal material for those whose incomes ranged from the merely well-off to the truly breathtaking, and its discretion amounted almost to paranoia. Famous clients were hinted at but never named. Something about the victim’s business seemed to be the subject of numerous whispered conferences in the courtroom (“approach the bench”) and the judge’s chambers. The defense usually emerged from these encounters looking still more harassed and defeated, but, of course, we weren’t supposed to speculate as to what they might be about.

  As if, as my teenage daughter would say. But titillating details were not forthcoming, and the dry, scientific recitation of experts slogging through the physical evidence didn’t bring the victim to life. Even the photographs were clinical. Her slim, Donna Karan–clad body was sprawled facedown on a rug that looked like Isfahan, though I couldn’t tell for sure without seeing
it in person. Her face was turned slightly toward the camera, but it was expressionless. A mass of dark hair hid the back of her head and the dented skull that had leached blood into a pool beneath it. Her left hand rested tranquilly, outstretched, in front of her, the wrist turned in slightly, as if she were consulting her Cartier watch one last time. A tasteful death, on the whole.

  I had seen the photographs so many times they had lost their ability to move me. I certainly wasn’t tempted to laugh, but I didn’t feel like weeping, either. Natasha Ivanova was just a corpse, albeit a fairly stylish one, and little I heard in the courtroom made her much more than that. According to the testimony presented, she had no enemies. She was generous to charities and kind to puppies and children. She’d arranged the gift of two Siberian yellow-throated martens to the L.A. Zoo from its counterpart in Moscow. An interesting choice, I thought. I’d seen them myself once or twice. They were hyperactive weasel-like animals with an endearing playfulness and a powerful odor, the only two of their kind in the U.S. They were supposedly here on a breeding program, but the keeper said that, despite strenuous bouts of frenetic sex, they’d turned out to be duds at procreation.

  Ivanova’s human clients apparently met with greater success. They were not only satisfied, but enthusiastic enough to recommend her. Of course, none of them took the stand; presumably, they were off enjoying their newfound nuptial bliss on the slopes of Gstaad or Aspen. The service’s fees ranged from $7,500 to $30,000, depending on the degree of personal attention you got from the owner herself.

  Even the number was unreal to most people on the jury. “I mean,” Leo had announced with just enough swagger to let us know that datelessness had never been a problem for him, “can you imagine laying out that kind of dough just to land yourself with the old ball and chain?” He twirled his wedding ring around on his finger, probably subconsciously.

  Poor Mrs. Leo, whoever she was, welded for life to a character out of a fifties sitcom. I hope she was insufficiently conscious of the degree of her misfortune, but I doubted it.

  Marta squirmed uncomfortably on the hard chair. “I just feel so sorry for his mother,” she said.

  So did I. She came every day of the trial, sitting quietly in the back. I hadn’t realized who she was—although there weren’t many spectators—until she approached Ramon as court adjourned one day and tried to speak to him before he was taken back to the jail. She’d lifted a hand toward him. He had looked at her briefly and turned away.

  It might have been defiance, or maybe shame. I didn’t know him well enough to say, but his mother had looked devastated. She used to clean the victim’s offices. Ramon had stolen her keys.

  Marta sighed. “Maybe the police are lying,” she said wistfully.

  Leo snorted.

  “Well, they do sometimes, you know…” she said.

  “It’s not unheard of,” Alvino agreed dryly.

  “Look, people,” Leo interjected, “could we just get on with this? This is just a preliminary head count, to see if we can come to a quick verdict. We don’t have to debate the entire justice system right now.” He sat back in his chair. “Do we?”

  Nobody answered.

  He looked at me. “Ellen?”

  I know why the prosecutor wanted me on this jury. I was chosen at the end, after two days of being forced to listen to the same questions asked over and over again for each prospective panel member (no reading in the courtroom, please), so I had quite a bit of time to think about it. The public defender had almost exhausted his peremptory challenges, and since he had no reason to dismiss me for “cause,” he had to accept me.

  I’m sure both of them thought I was the closest thing to the dead woman’s counterpart that they were going to find in the jury pool. We were about the same age—okay, I probably had a year or two on her, but Elder-hostels and AARP cards were only a decade (or less) away, the pre-cellulite era a fading memory. I have a genteel occupation. Plus—and this is the part that probably counted most—I look Anglo and affluent (the two Big As), the kind of person likely to view the other side of the tracks with horrified suspicion. The kind of person, in point of fact, most likely to convict a gang-banger brown defendant who didn’t even know enough to show up in a coat and tie at his own murder trial.

  Ha. Well, at least a partial ha. The fact is, I did think Ramon was guilty, and I have no sympathy for burglars/killers, whatever their socioethnic credentials. But the truth about me was a lot more complicated, and I wasn’t exactly what I looked like.

  “Mrs. Laws,” the prosecutor had asked me, “are you presently married?”

  I looked him in the eye. “My husband died,” I told him.

  “I see,” he said deferentially, looking down. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  The last time I’d had to report for jury duty was only a few months after my husband’s death. The case was a medical malpractice suit, and the plaintiff’s attorney asked me what my husband died of and whether I had been perfectly satisfied with his medical care, or whether I believed his doctors could have done something more to save his life. I broke down, with a whole roomful of people—prospective jurors, the lawyers, the plaintiffs and defendants, and all the staff—watching and listening. It was like having your therapist’s notes broadcast to the crowd at a football game. They got me out of there fast, but it still makes me angry to think about it.

  “Thank you,” I said formally.

  “Have you seen other men since your husband’s death?”

  I looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  He stepped back. “What I mean is, do you date other men?”

  What was next, my gynecological history? “Sometimes,” I said as calmly as possible, “but mostly not.”

  “And why is that?” he asked, not wanting to look at me.

  He’s just doing his job, I reminded myself. It made me tolerate him a little better, so I answered as honestly as I could. “Initially because I had a child who had just lost a father, and I didn’t want to complicate her life any more than I had to. And because now I don’t really want to get married again, so there isn’t much point.”

  “So you’ve never used a dating or matchmaking service?”

  “No.”

  “Would you consider using such a service?”

  “No.”

  “Do you feel that there’s anything wrong or distasteful about using such a service?”

  I thought about it. “Not if you’re careful, no.”

  “And would you consider running a matchmaking service a respectable occupation?”

  He meant: Would I think the victim deserved what she got because she was some kind of latter-day Heidi Fleiss, pimping for rich people, or would I buy the noble matchmaker description? “It depends,” I told him.

  “Depends on what, Mrs. Laws?”

  “On whether that’s really what’s involved.”

  He seemed reasonably satisfied. The defense attorney had a different focus. Did I think immigration was a problem in the U.S., particularly immigration from Mexico? Did I employ any domestic help? Did I think gangs were out of control? Did I know anyone well who’d ever been involved in a homicide?

  Well, this was Southern California, for heaven’s sake. If this was a melting pot, a lot of what was in the olla was menudo. People were hurling themselves at the border every day, running across freeways and packing themselves into mobile deathtraps just to get into el Norte. Some politician or other was always ranting about the high costs of “illegals,” and every bare wall from the corner market to the freeway overpasses was a palimpsest for gangland testosterone. There were advantages and disadvantages. What was a good liberal supposed to say?

  At least I could tell him that I cleaned my own house. There hadn’t been any murders in the family, either. What I didn’t volunteer was that my father had been one of those enterprising Mexican immigrants, a smooth operator who outfoxed the migra by getting my thoroughly Anglo mother with child and marrying her in a civil ceremony marked by
its brevity and lack of glamour. The Immigration and Naturalization Service is understandably skeptical about such unions, and my father hung around for a couple of years to complete the follow-up interviews and evaluation before skipping town with his green card and the slightly used Packard my mother’s parents had grudgingly given her as a wedding present.

  That’s my mother’s version of the story, anyway. There are plenty of reasons to be somewhat suspicious of her particular chapter in Seduced and Abandoned, vol. 150. The family record with men isn’t the greatest, to say the least. We drive them away, or they die before their time. There are all kinds of variations on the theme—compulsive womanizers, alcoholic weaklings, genetic diseases that kick in unexpectedly—but the results are always the same. A family full of women, alone. I’d spent half my daughter’s formative years trying to shield her from the curse.

  My mother went to extraordinary lengths to purge herself of the Latin Influence, so to speak—about which, more later. We didn’t have riotous Cinco de Mayo celebrations. I wasn’t even allowed to take Spanish in high school. She made me take French instead, which was fun but totally useless in Southern California. We moved to an apartment in a respectable but dull blue-collar community while my mother was paid near-starvation wages as a sales clerk in different stores in the Del Amo Shopping Center, one day to become the World’s Largest, at least for a while.

  I went to school with a few other Hispanic kids, who were mostly quiet in class and kept to themselves. I began to perceive that my background would not be treated as advantageous if it were known. I didn’t look the part—I have brown hair and green eyes—and since my mother treated my Mexican heritage like a terrible secret, I did, too. I absorbed the poison gradually, drop by drop, until “Don’t say anything”—the unofficial family motto—became mine, too. After a while, when somebody asked about my surname—Santiago—I told them it was Spanish for “St. James.” That was true; I just didn’t mention where it had gone after it left Old Spain.