Sins of the Fathers

by James Scott Bell

  And change did happen. For a time. Most kid-adults were taken to Sylmar, a juvi lockup, and that seemed to make everybody feel good. But pretty soon the bottom line snapped its jaws tight around the situation: it cost more to put kids out there.

  So little by little, the warehousing of juvis in Men’s Central—isolated from the adult population, of course, but crammed inside those cells that had only a toilet and what the county had the temerity to call bedding—little by little, the dumping of kids no one had any sympathy for returned. And without the Times making hay, the politicians kept quiet.

  There was no rousing plea to be kinder to juvenile criminals.

  He didn’t look like Lindy had pictured. When he was marched into the interview room, shackled and in his orange jailhouse jumpsuit, he was a lot smaller than she thought he’d be. Lindy estimated he was about her height. Which wasn’t good for him. If he got sent to prison—and Lindy knew that was the most likely outcome, even if Clarence Darrow came back from the dead to defend him—Darren DiCinni was not going to last long. He’d be fresh meat, tossed into a pit of ravenous lowlifes with nothing left to lose.

  “Twenty minutes,” the deputy sheriff said as he put Darren’s hands in the desk cuffs. The jail classified juveniles as K–10s, highest security, and kept them isolated. The deputies claimed it was because juvis did crazy things, to prove themselves to the older inmates. Darren was also a “high power” inmate, one with notoriety and media coverage. He needed to be protected from prisoners who might want to make a name for themselves by taking out a celebrity killer.

  She tried to read his face. Who was Darren DiCinni, besides some teenager lost in oversized coveralls? Who was this boy sitting on the steel stool on the other side of the wire-mesh Plexiglas in the green interview booth, accused of an abominable crime? How did he get to this place?

  She always asked herself these questions about new juvenile clients. They were only a step or two removed from childhood, yet they did evil things.

  Why?

  He did not look at her.

  Lindy leaned toward the talk holes in the Plexiglas. “Darren, I’m Lindy Field. I’m your attorney.”

  His eyes did not move. He was staring at the floor like some sort of comic-book character who could cut through stone with laser beams shot from his eyeballs. Lindy suddenly had no trouble believing he had killed six people in cold blood.

  “I’m here to talk to you about your case.”

  No change.

  Lindy had handled bad ones before, ones with attitude, with chips on shoulders the size of buses. But she’d always managed to penetrate the barriers, at least a little bit, to a level where she could communicate.

  Some were tougher to get to than others, that was all.

  Darren DiCinni was going to be one of the tougher ones.

  “Look, you don’t have to talk to me now, but at some point we’re going to have to get together on this thing. The DA isn’t going to look out for you. The cops aren’t. Your lawyer is, but you’ve got to give me something. Remember, anything you say will stay with me. I won’t talk about it with anybody else.”

  That was always the first move. Establish trust. Cast yourself on their side.

  DiCinni didn’t move.

  There was something strange here.

  Despite his inner fires, Darren DiCinni didn’t have a bad-boy aura. His light brown hair was trimmed and neat. He was a skinny kid too, stuck in that awkward stage between child and young man. His hands and wrists looked as if they could slip right out of the shackles, like toothpicks from a wedding band. And his face, cool and impassive, was almost translucent, like baby skin.

  Darren DiCinni was not, at first glance, like the tattooed and scarred outlaws she was used to. Nor was he trying to be.

  But the peculiar thing was, he wasn’t some tragic innocent, either. A few years ago, another young, skinny kid had shot up a school down near San Diego. He looked so young, so impossibly young to do such a thing.

  DiCinni might have seemed that way too, except for those eyes. And that made him impossible for Lindy to peg.

  There was a reason he did not fit into any apparent slot, and Lindy had to find out what that was. She had the feeling the answer would be her—and DiCinni’s—only hope of getting a more favorable sentence than life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  “Darren, I’m going to talk to the DA about your case. I need to get to know you just a little. I want you to know you can trust me.”

  Nothing. Those lasers burned into the floor.

  Maybe there was a competency issue here. Maybe DiCinni wouldn’t have the capacity to help with the defense, and she could get him into a mental facility, keep him out of prison.

  “You gonna talk to me today, Darren?”

  She waited. And then, slowly, DiCinni shook his head. He still had not looked at her.

  Lindy wanted to reach through the glass and grab him, shake him. She wanted to rouse him out of his stupor, force him to pay attention, make him realize he was dangling over a gorge by a string. And, she realized, to make him help her. She didn’t want to lose another one like she lost Marcel Lee.

  “Please,Darren. Let me help you. That’s what I’m here for, that’s what I do. I went to law school and everything. I had seven years with the public defender’s office. Will you just give me something to work with here?”

  DiCinni looked up. She now could see his eyes were brown speckled with flecks of green. They were still shooting hot beams, but with something added. A probing.

  She let him look.

  Then Darren DiCinni started rattling his desk cuffs. Violently.

  “Darren—”

  The metallic clatter got louder.

  “Stop, Darren.”

  He did not stop.

  The deputy charged over and slapped Darren’s back. “Cut it out.”

  “I wanna go back,” Darren said. His voice was high, like a choirboy’s.

  “Darren, you have to talk to me,” Lindy pleaded.

  He glared at her with a mix of defiance and confusion. The deputy began to undo the shackles.

  “Darren, wait.”

  The deputy looked at Lindy with disdain. “Says he’s through, he’s through.”

  Lindy put her hand on the Plexiglas. “Wait a second.”

  But the deputy already had the desk cuffs off. Darren got up quickly and didn’t look back as he was led away.

  Outside Men’s Central, the harsh glare of the LA afternoon sun hit Lindy’s eyes like a police interrogation light. The kind cops used to coerce confessions in those old B movies. Why don’t you just admitit, Lindy? Come on, you know it, we all know it. You lost your chopswhen they put you in the psych ward. You don’t have what it takes. Yourfather knew it all along, didn’t he? Tried to tell you. What’ve you got toprove, Lindy? Give it up. You can’t help anybody, especially this kid whorattles chains at you.

  She had to get to her bike. The growl of her Harley was the only thing that could drown out her thoughts this day. But she knew, with a harsh, prophetic certainty, that no sound was going to help her this time.

  TWO

  1.

  The moment she realized she was waking up, Mona Romney cried out in her mind.

  No, oh please no, dear God, don’t let me. Don’t let me wake up. Letme die, dear God, let me die.

  But her consciousness fought, dragging her toward wakefulness.

  Where am I? I don’t want to be here. I want to go back.

  She felt a coldness on the other side of what she determined were sheets. The lights were too bright. She wanted to go back to blackness, but her body would not let her.

  The bright light was from sunshine streaming through the window.

  Make it stop! Make the light go away!

  She wanted to yell at somebody to close the curtains, but she had no voice. Her throat felt thick and her tongue was a sand weight on the bottom of her mouth.

  Why do I want to die? She struggled to reme
mber.

  “Honey?”

  The voice drifted into her ears, unwelcome.

  “How you feeling? Can you hear me? You been out a long time.”

  Brad. Her husband. Loving Brad. Faithful and strong. She wanted him to go away. She wanted to scream at him to go away.

  She felt his hand on her forehead, stroking it. She wanted to jerk away from him but her body was too heavy with drowsiness. That was it. She remembered now. They’d given her a sedative. She’d been some kind of hysterical.

  She was home.

  No, no! I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere Matthewis not.

  “Babe, it’s me. I love you so much.”

  Go away.

  “I’ve been praying all night. I was on the floor in the living room on my face, just crying out to God. I’m so tired.”

  “Yes?” Brad was a fuzzy blur next to the bed. He was holding her hand, squeezing it. “You want to say something?”

  She opened her mouth and a guttural, wordless groan spilled out.

  Mona swallowed. It was an effort, like pushing a wide rock down a narrow dirt hole. But she was going to speak, she had to speak or she’d go crazy. She was probably crazy anyway, and always would be.

  “What is it?” Brad whispered.

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what? Are you uncomfortable?”

  She squeezed his hand with all the strength she had, which was not very much, but enough to make his hand tremble in hers.

  “Don’t. Talk about . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “God.”

  “But—”

  She squeezed his hand harder. “Ever.”

  She released him and he stood up. Stiff. She could tell. She knew when something hit her husband hard. Like when he got the news his dad had died. How he stood stock-still with the phone in his hand, like a granite statue titled Man with Mouth Half Open. Or when his former business partner served him with a lawsuit. That time it was Man with Hurt on Face.

  Now he was stiff like that again. Wet clay fashioned into a kind, loving, Christian husband whose wife was telling him not to bring up the name of God in front of her.

  Oh how she meant it.

  Matthew Romney was only eleven years old. And he had one of those sunny outlooks that gets turned into a Disney film. His pitching arm had made him one of the stars of the league, but he had a side Mona was sure only she could fully understand. He was sensitive like her. He felt things deeply. He told her once, when she was tucking him in and it was just the two of them, that he wanted to make people feel better when they hurt. Because that’s what she did for him.

  He was eight years old when he said that.

  Now he was dead.

  And now her husband was standing there, and she had hurt him. Or maybe just confused him. She didn’t care.

  For a moment, that scared her.

  But then she did not care that she was scared.

  “Go away,” she said and then mustered the strength to turn her back to him and bury her face in the pillow.

  2.

  “Lindy, good to see you.” Leon Colby had all the sincerity of a showroom smoothie. The only difference was he was bigger than any car salesman she’d ever seen, at least six foot six, and he still had that linebacker’s body. His hair was short and in his glasses he looked like a very large Ivy League professor. No wonder juries loved him. He possessed that aura of power and intelligence combined with a certain charisma that made superstars in any profession.

  That’s why the buzz around town was that he would make a good run at becoming the first African-American district attorney in LA history.

  Lindy felt her hands go clammy even as she tried to breathe steadily. Power flowed downward from Colby to her, and she knew it.

  “Been what, a couple years?” Colby said. “Coffee?”

  “No thanks.” Lindy sat on one of the hard chairs in front of Colby’s desk. She noticed it was almost pathologically neat. Even the small pad of Post-its was set so its lines were parallel with the desk edge. She couldn’t help comparing it to her own “desk”—a kitchen table that looked like a Dumpster behind a stationery store.

  “So how you doing?” Colby said, turning and grabbing a small coffeepot from the credenza.

  Better than Marcel Lee, thank you very much. “I’m okay.”

  “Good. ’Cause I heard about . . . that you were in . . .”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, good, it’s good to be fine.” He picked up the file folder sitting on his desk. Like all DA folders, this one had a form printed on the outside, with lots of boxes for checking off as the case progressed from arraignment to sentencing. It appeared Colby had made no check marks on this one. Yet.

  “So Greene assigned you to Darren DiCinni,” Colby said.

  “I’m going to handle the arraignment. After that, I don’t know.”

  Colby opened the file and gave it a cursory look. “Maybe we can work something out.”

  She had prepared for this moment and pounced. “I’m going to want a suspension of proceedings.”

  Colby closed the file. “What for?”

  “A 1368 hearing.”

  “Mental competency exam?”

  “You got it.”

  “You’re dreaming.”

  “Am I?”

  “Come on, Lindy. You have to show he is unable—unable—to understand the nature of the proceedings. Houseplants understand the nature of proceedings.”

  Cute. “The statute also says he has to comprehend his own status and condition in those proceedings. You haven’t even seen him.”

  “I haven’t seen Paris. Doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And just because he claims God talked to him doesn’t—”

  “We are going to have a 1368.”

  Colby didn’t flinch. “That just gives me more time to prepare for trial. And make no mistake, Lindy. This case is going to trial. Unless . . .” He raised his eyebrows, as if to signal it was now Lindy’s move.

  “You have an offer?”

  “He’s going to have to do time.A lot of it.”

  “You don’t even know his background.”

  “We don’t let murderers off because of background.”

  “This kid needs help.”

  “Based on what? Have you done any background on him?”

  Lindy felt like a hostile witness skewered to the witness chair by Leon Colby’s almost legendary cross-examination skills. She cleared her throat.“We haven’t come close to doing a full probe on this one, but when—”

  “Want me to make it easy for you?”

  Lindy waited. He would make it easy for the jury too, unless she came up with something soon.

  “This is no climate for mercy,” Colby said. “People are sick of this kind of thing, no matter what age the killer is. You want soft gloves? Forget it.”

  “There’s a risk for you taking this to trial.”

  “Get serious, Lindy. The only factual issue is going to be mental state at the time of the shootings. You got something I should hear about?”

  “It’ll come.”

  “Let’s see.” Colby looked at his fingers as if they were a crib sheet. “You can’t go for duress. The Cal Supremes ruled that’s no longer a defense for murder. Maybe you could try to nullify premeditation-deliberation, keep it from the special circumstance of ‘lying in wait.’ But People v. Hillhouse says just walking up to a victim qualifies as ‘lying in wait.’ Here you’ve got a kid walking up to a whole field of vics. You want me to go on?”

  “Fascinating.” And scary, because Leon Colby was brilliant. Lindy had researched him during the Lee case. Colby was second in his class at UCLA Law after finishing up an all-American football career for the Bruins. Only a blown-out knee kept him from getting millions in the pros.

  And while Colby was getting the glory at UCLA, Lindy was slogging away in the night program at little Southwestern Law School, working during the day at Target. The difference in
legal pedigree was not lost on her. In the world of criminal law, he was best in show. She was a night-school mutt.

  “Now, you might be thinking some kind of insanity defense,” Colby continued. “The God told me thing.We all know how successful that defense is. Al Sharpton has a better chance of being elected mascot for the Ku Klux Klan. So where does that leave us?”

  “We got a thirteen-year-old kid who I’ve seen up close and you haven’t. No jury is going to want to toss him to the wolves.”

  “You think? You think after all the gang killings and—”

  “There’s no gang connection here.”

  “Close enough for government work.”

  “I can’t believe you said that. Since when is close enough a legal standard?”

  “I’m talking about perception, Lindy, about people being fed up with the streets going to juvis with guns.You want to get some sympathy going for this kid? Good luck.”

  “Neither one of us knows jack about this kid. How can you sit there and say anything?”

  “Because we’re holding all the cards here, and they come up L-WOP.”

  “Life without parole? That’s your deal?” Some deal. L-WOP was the harshest sentence for murder short of lethal injection. Served in a maximum-security prison. Where Darren DiCinni wouldn’t last five minutes. And who would care? Prison rape was an issue the public or politicians didn’t want to look at. The harsh picture of what prisons had become was too disturbing, too disruptive for California dreamin’.

  Lindy’s hands closed around the chair arms. “You can’t send this kid to state prison for life.”

  “Who says?”

  “There was a case, a couple of years ago. In re John J. or something. Had to do with juveniles going to state.”

  Colby smiled as a father would to a child who was delving into issues well beyond her understanding. “That case was depublished by the Supremes. There’s no authority on it now, and we’re going into this thing without any reservation. We think the Court of Appeal will back us up, if it comes to that.”