Sins of the Fathers

by James Scott Bell

  The words that formed in Lindy’s mind caused pain. But she knew she had to say them. “What sort of deal can we talk about?”

  She almost did not look at his face when she said it. But when she did, she thought she saw something like pity in his eyes. Because he did hold all the cards, and they both knew it. A plea bargain was the best she could expect on this, and that was true most of the time anyway. Even though every citizen is supposed to have a right to trial, the fact was, judges would hold a trial against you at sentencing time. If you didn’t plead out, you’d face a much harsher penalty if the jury came back with a guilty verdict.

  The justice system was a rigged roulette wheel.

  “Murder second,” Colby said.

  Lindy clenched her jaw. “Reverse remand.” A juvenile tried in adult court could, with the prosecution’s cooperation, be remanded back to the juvenile system. If a client got a sentence of fifteen to life under juvenile law, he would go to the California Youth Authority and not state prison. When he turned twenty-five, he could get out.

  “Not gonna happen, Lindy.”

  “Why not? What’s so all-consuming about a thirteen-year-old who—” Lindy stopped her own words, pistons firing in her mind. “Wait a second. This is about you, isn’t it?”

  “Me?”

  “About you becoming DA.”

  He paused momentarily before answering. “I take the cases as they come.”

  Lindy pointed to the top of Colby’s filing cabinet, at the little statue of a blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice. “When did you stop believing in that? When did it become a matter of winning at all costs?”

  Now the darkness in Colby’s eyes seemed to take over his entire form. “If you’re trying to soften me up, you’re doing a lousy job.”

  “No,” Lindy said. “I’m not going to soften you up. I’m just trying to get you to do it right this time.”

  “This time?”

  “Marcel Lee was convicted on a lie, and you know it.”

  Colby looked at her with the cool menace that quarterbacks who opposed him must have seen countless times. “This meeting is over, Lindy. I’m going to see to it that this monster goes away forever.”

  3.

  “Are you a monster?”

  Lindy stared at Darren DiCinni through the Plexiglas in the jail’s interview room.

  Darren’s face held the same, expressionless gaze as before. But she thought her words got his attention this time.

  “Yeah, that’s what the prosecutor says, that’s what the whole town, the whole world, is saying about you. You got anything to tell me to make it otherwise?”

  Darren DiCinni shook his head.

  It was communication of a sort, a step in the right direction.

  Lindy took another step. “You care what happens to you?”

  Darren looked at her a moment, shrugged.

  “At least let me tell you what’s happening. Will you let me do that much?”

  He said nothing.

  “All right. The DA wants to make an example out of you. He wants to treat you as an adult and get you a life sentence, without possibility of parole. That means you’ll go into the adult prison population and never come out.”

  “Can’t they just kill me?”

  There was his voice again, a child’s voice. The innocence of it made Lindy want to scream. What kind of world is this? What world turns out a kid who, just a few years past Barney stage, goes out to shoot down children with a rifle?

  Lindy wrestled her insides to the mat. “No, Darren. You don’t have to worry about that. You’re a juvenile, and in this state we don’t put juveniles to death, even when they’re tried as adults.”

  “I want them to.”

  An iciness gripped her. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Tell them.”

  “Tell them what?”

  “I want to die. I want them to do it to me. Tell them.”

  Lindy looked at his face. His smooth skin wasn’t even forming pimples yet. But he wanted to die. And thousands of people out there would be happy to shove the needle into his arm. “You’re not going to face the death penalty. But they can put you away for life. In prison. With hardened adult criminals. I can’t let that happen to you.”

  He seemed to be thinking about this, ideas tumbling in his immature brain, conjuring confusing images. “You called me a monster.”

  “That’s what the DA’s calling you.”

  “You think I’m a monster?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You don’t even know me. Maybe I am.”

  She wanted to tell him that he was too young to be a monster, to be consigned forever to that fate. Did she believe it? Maybe some were born this way. Maybe she’d been wrong about juveniles all along. One big sap.

  “Help me to help you,” Lindy said.

  Darren DiCinni shook his head. She could perceive him retreating into his skinny shell.

  “Darren?”

  No answer this time. And despite five more minutes of trying, she pulled no more words from him.

  4.

  It was nearly dark when Lindy returned to her mobile home in Box Canyon in the westernmost part of Los Angeles County. Box Canyon was the last outpost of soon-to-reach-retirement-age hippies, bikers, and a smattering of folks who remembered when they could actually hunt in these hills.

  And a solo lawyer who needed money.

  As she got off her bike, Mr. Klinger called to her from over the fence.

  “Hey, fancy lawyer!” Emil Klinger was well into his eighties, a former Catskills comedian who’d done some character work in B movies in the fifties. He lived next door and usually wore a white undershirt and suspenders, as he was now. Thatches of white hair marked his shoulders and chest like scrub brush.

  “How you doing, Mr. Klinger?”

  “My urine is pink.”

  It was Emil Klinger’s passion to share his physical dissolution with Lindy at the start of every conversation.

  “You taking your medications?” Lindy checked up on him regularly, to make sure he was getting the attention he needed. He didn’t have family close by.

  “Marry me and find out.”

  “You know I would, Mr. Klinger, but it would make my cat jealous.”

  He shrugged. “Ah, s’okay. At my age there’s six women for every man.”

  “That so?”

  He shook his head ruefully. “What a time to get odds like that.

  Can you make a will for my son?”

  “That’s not my specialty.”

  “He doesn’t care for specialties. He’s an idiot. But a paying idiot.”

  Actually, a simple will sounded good. Anything simple that paid sounded good. “Okay, have him call me.”

  “You got it, baby. And then I’ll call you myself.” Klinger clucked a couple of times.

  “I’ll drop by later to check in on you. But no hanky-panky, right?”

  “What’s to hank or pank? I went from Why not? to Why bother? years ago.”

  Lindy went inside her trailer. Her cat, Cardozo, greeted her with a sophisticated mew. He was a black-and-white she found half dead in the hills of Box Canyon. She nursed him back to health and named him for Benjamin Cardozo, the great Supreme Court justice whose opinions Lindy loved reading in law school.

  “What a day I’ve had. Wanna get fat? I’ll get the ice cream, and you can pork out on some of those salmon treats you like. Whaddaya say?”

  Cardozo blinked.

  “So am I ready to take on another case?”

  No answer. But Cardozo was listening.

  Lindy got the mocha almond fudge from her freezer and started spooning some into a bowl. “Or am I still crazy and should go into another line of work? Like price checker at the Everything’s-a-Dollar store. Think I could handle that?”

  Cardozo padded over to her feet.

  “Oh really? You want me to get out there again? Go for it? Look who’s talking. When’s the last time you caught
a mouse around here?”

  Lindy grabbed a few salmon treats and doled one out to Cardozo.

  “Okay, kid, we’ll figure this out together.”

  Her cell phone chimed. She saw a familiar number on the LCD. Great. Not the call she wanted right now, but she’d have to deal with him sooner or later.

  “Hi, Sean.”

  “Hey, babe, you picked up. That’s a good sign.” His voice was honey rich, easy on the ears. Seductive. That and his matinee idol looks made it easy to understand why he was such a hot TV reporter in a town full of eye candy.

  “You’re just lucky, I guess,” Lindy said.

  “Good to hear your voice without the knives in it.” Two nights ago Sean McIntyre took Lindy to Geoffrey’s in Malibu, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, then back to his apartment for another stunning view. Then he had tried to view something more, pawing at her clothes and kissing her until she socked him in the jaw and left.

  “So when can we go out again?” Sean said.

  “I thought I made it clear—”

  “I called to apologize, okay?”

  “I’m about to go to bed.”

  “Care for company?”

  “You are a piece of work.”

  “That’s what my publicity says.”

  She paused, fighting urges within her. Hang up? Keep talking? “Your publicity also says you’re not wanting for female company, so—”

  “Whoa, we’re not talking about other women.”

  “I am.”

  “Lindy, I know I’ve been out with a lot of women the past couple of years—”

  “No kidding. Who was that last one, that anchor woman?”

  “Sahara Davis?”

  “Yeah. What kind of name is Sahara anyway? She should be dating Lawrence of Arabia.”

  “The Sahara’s in Africa.”

  “Don’t get technical.”

  “Can you really blame me for the other night? That I find you attractive? Come on. We’ve been going out a month and we haven’t even . . .”

  “Even what? We talked, remember? Talking is a good adult thing to do. And then we walked on the beach, you kissed me.”

  “Yeah, but come on, a month.”

  “Sean, I’ve given up casual sex, okay? It doesn’t work. It’s like the Thighmaster of human relations.”

  “Come to New York with me.”

  “Sean—”

  “Did you hear me say New York? I’m going to be interviewed on the Today Show. About my reporting on the Dixon murder. It could mean a network gig.”

  “Sean, you’re a great reporter—”

  “I know.”

  “But I need to give this a rest for a while.”

  “Look, I’m sorry it happened. What can I say? I had a little too much to drink, I admit it.”

  “A little? You were doing shooters like breath mints and then you grew four arms and used them all on me.”

  “I can be incredibly charming once you get to know me.”

  Lindy said nothing, believing him and not wanting to believe him at the same time. Remember the anger. She honestly didn’t know what he did to her. She only knew that part of her wanted to keep him and not let him go. But another part was shouting, Stop, idiot!

  “All right,” Sean said. “I’ll go to New York alone. But don’t be getting hooked on anybody while I’m gone.” His jaunty tone had an edge.

  “Have a nice trip.”

  “I intend to.”

  He hung up. That bothered her no end. The least he could have done was let her hang up on him.

  That night Lindy dreamed of death.

  5.

  First came the children.

  In Lindy’s dream they were running and screaming, dozens of them, in some sunlit field. A billowing surge of terrified kids, boys and girls, some in baseball garb, others in variegated ragtag clothes that gave the impression of a Dickens novel run amok.

  A dark, unseen terror chased them. From the hovering perspective that only dreams afford, Lindy sought desperately the source of the fear.

  She saw a black forest behind the field, one that belonged in fairy tales. Or nightmares.

  She moved toward the forest, knowing who it was, who was in there, knowing she’d meet him coming out. Darren DiCinni would have a gun, and in the dream she glided low to avoid being shot.

  Moving closer and closer now, the screams of the scattering children fading behind her. Without having to look behind she knew that a raft of cops was pulling up to the scene.

  Was she going to warn DiCinni, or just look at him?

  Would he say anything to her, or she to him?

  Bad things lived here, in this gloom where gnarly fingered trees came alive at night.

  Lindy didn’t want to go in, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  A shadowy figure started to materialize, from deep within the forest, and it was running toward her.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

  Stop, stop, stop she wanted to say, but she could utter no words.

  The figure came closer. He was holding a shotgun.

  Pointed at her.

  He was going to kill her, and she couldn’t move. Her feet became sandbags.

  And then, on the edge of the forest, where the light from her world met the shadows of his, the killer emerged and now she did not scream but opened her mouth wide and silent.

  It was not Darren DiCinni.

  It was Marcel Lee.

  And then, powerless to stop them, Lindy was assaulted by image after image from a tortured past.

  She saw Marcel, running with a gang at seventeen, trying to get out. Now accused of murdering a cop.

  I ain’t do it, Ms. Field . . .

  She saw his eyes again and knew he wasn’t scamming. She could tell, after six years of looking into juvi eyes.

  She shouldn’t care. She told herself in her mind, in her dream, she shouldn’t care so much about a client. But she always did. And Marcel’s mother, who told Lindy she trusted her with her son’s life.

  She saw the police witness, Officer Brandon Scott. She saw his eyes again, lying eyes. Like in the song.

  And Leon Colby. He had to know his wit was lying. But he didn’t care. And in her dream, he didn’t care again.

  She saw Marcel Lee, going away to do life in Quentin. And his mother, crying and screaming in the courtroom. At her.

  Why’d you let ’em do it? Why didn’t you stop ’em?

  In her dream, Lindy’s heart bolted out of her chest, bloody and beating, and fled into the dark place.

  The dark place was Elmwood, the psych facility where they’d taken her after weeks of barely any sleep, after downing half a bottle of pills to kill the ghosts.

  She saw Marcel’s face again, only it wasn’t his face, it was Darren DiCinni’s face now, and he looked at her, wild-eyed and hopeless.

  And that’s when the guns in shadowed hands opened fire, filling his body with holes, his blood spraying her.

  6.

  “I can’t do it,” Lindy said.

  It was 8:14 Tuesday morning. Darren DiCinni’s arraignment was scheduled for nine. Lindy’s stomach was churning. She could see the corner of the Times building through the window of Judge Greene’s chambers.

  Greene, as always, spoke calmly.

  “Is this you talking, or is it Marcel Lee?”

  Lindy shot him a look, saw the astonishing understanding in his face.

  “Both,” Lindy admitted.

  “Then take it. Take the case. You have to put the ghosts to rest.”

  “They never rest.”

  Greene laced his fingers behind his head. “The thing about fear is that you don’t get rid of it by will. And you can’t sit around and wait for it to leave. It won’t. What you do is act. Right in the face of it. And then it slowly loses its power.”

  Lindy rubbed her hands over the worn leather briefcase on her lap. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost another one.”

  “But y
ou’re not going to lose this one.”

  She looked at him, wondering what he could possibly mean.

  Greene leaned forward, putting his elbows on his desk. A pewter representation of the Ten Commandments sat to one side. Lindy always wondered what the ACLU would have thought had they known. She carried an ACLU card herself.

  “Here’s what you do, Lindy. Go down there and plead him not guilty. Then make a statement to the reporters. Speak from your heart. Presumption of innocence for everyone. A bedrock of our system. The facts aren’t fully known. You know the drill.”

  Lindy waited.

  “Then you tell Colby you’re willing to plead guilty in return for disposition to a mental institution. They’ll offer you the twenty-five-to- life deal. You insist on minimum security and you’ll take it. Everyone comes out ahead. The state is spared the expense of a trial, you make a great deal for the boy, everyone knows your name.”

  For a long moment Lindy saw it unfold just as Greene had said. “What if a mental is really what he needs?”

  “If you can get Colby to go along with that, it would be a double victory.”

  “I still don’t know. Let me get him through arraignment and—”

  “Do it, Lindy. I know you can. And I’ll be right here if you need me.”

  For the first time in a long time, Lindy felt like crying. She wanted to let everything out, find some footing in life again. She wanted to do it in front of Roger Greene, the one man who could understand what she was going through.

  But she saw it was 8:44, and she had a boy waiting for his arraignment for mass murder.

  Just get through the next hour. One step at a time. Isn’t that whatthey told you, over and over, in the hospital? One step at a time. Fiveminute increments, and you’re done.

  But a cold tentacle of dread wrapped itself around her heart, squeezing the life out of any incipient hope for conclusion.

  THREE

  1.

  As mother of one of the victims, Mona Romney was allowed a seat in arraignment court, along with the press, which was well represented. Several reporters asked her for a comment, but she refused. She was not ready to talk to reporters, or anyone else for that matter. She was here for Matthew, for his memory. And to see that justice was done.