Sins of the Fathers

by James Scott Bell

  Plopping on the couch, Lindy snatched a copy of GQ off the glass coffee table. “You leave this literature around where people can actually see it?”

  “Hey, I’ve got a spread in there.” Sean entered, carrying a single glass of white wine. “What can I get you to drink, Lindy? Tap water?”

  “Nothing for me. This isn’t a social visit, if you’ll recall.”

  He sat next to her, keeping a respectable distance. “Can’t we just relax a little first?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t beat around the bush, Lindy. Just tell me how you feel.”

  She flipped through the magazine, finding the photos of Sean without a problem. Apparently the periodical had been thumbed frequently to this spot.

  Lindy nodded. “Makeup does wonders.”

  “Funny.” Sean put his feet up on the coffee table. He was wearing dark socks to go with his slacks. His casual silk shirt was two buttons open at the collar. “Do I look like an animal to you?”

  Lindy tossed the magazine on the table. It hit the edge and fluttered to the floor. She made no move to retrieve it.

  “So how did you land this plum assignment?” Sean asked.

  “Plum?”

  “It’s national news. Your face is going to be everywhere.”

  “You think I care about that?”

  “Don’t all lawyers care about that?”

  She turned, pulling one leg up on the sofa, and faced him.“Were you born cynical, or did you develop it all on your own?”

  Sean winked. “Which answer will get you to spend the night?”

  “Can we get down to business, please?” Lindy opened her briefcase and pulled out a legal pad.

  Sean sipped his wine and smiled. “I’m here to serve.”

  “So you know where Darren’s father is?”

  “Yep.”

  “And that would be . . . ?”

  “Nearby.”

  “Okay, wise guy. Just tell me.”

  “Now look, Counselor, you don’t think I’m just going to give up this choice nugget out of the goodness of my heart, do you?”

  “Your heart has goodness?”

  “Maybe you choose not to see it.” He leaned toward her and actually bobbed his eyebrows. It was like he was sixteen years old.

  “Can we get back to the matter at hand?” Lindy said.

  “We never left it. We’re discussing this piece of valuable information. I’m a reporter. Maybe I want something in return. Quid proquo, as they say.”

  “What you want I’m not giving.”

  Sean put his hand over his heart in feigned shock. “You make me sound like such a tramp.”

  Lindy smiled and almost nodded.

  “Look, I already apologized for being a jerk, what more do you want?”

  “I want to know where DiCinni’s father is.”

  “Then give me the inside story.”

  “What inside story?”

  “On your client. What makes him tick and all that soft stuff they eat up on The View. This is the biggest crime story of the year. Maybe I can get a book deal out of it, a shot at a network show.”

  “I told you, I don’t know if I’m going to rep him.”

  “Right, the whole Leon Colby thing.”

  “What Leon Colby thing?”

  “You don’t have to explain. I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “You don’t think I can handle it?”

  “You don’t think you can.”

  Boom. He was right. The aura of self-doubt emanated from her. Was she ever going to get past it? If she was going to be a lawyer, she would have to, or she’d be no good for any client.

  “How about this,” Sean said, “just to show you my good intentions: I’ll give you what I have. You follow up. If you take the case, you help me out from time to time. A little insight here, a little there.

  I’m a reasonable man.”

  She pondered this a moment. “Okay. I’ll give you what I can. But I can’t reveal confidences. You know that. So we’ll do this on my terms. I say how and where we talk.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Now you.”

  Sean reached over and took the pad from Lindy. He wrote something on it, handed it back. It was an address.

  “Drake and Darren lived in an apartment about half a block from the park. But Drake took off, left the place when his son got popped, and is now living here.”

  “You mind telling me how you found him?”

  “Reveal a source? Lindy, you shock me.”

  “Fair enough.” She slipped the pad into her briefcase and clasped it shut.

  “You’re free to stay the night,” Sean said.

  She felt her insides starting to heat up. “Sean, look, I’m serious. I’m giving up men for Lent.”

  “You’re not Catholic.”

  “And I don’t even know when Lent is. Don’t get technical.”

  Suddenly he put his hand behind her neck, pulled her to him, and kissed her. She let him. For a long moment she lingered over flame, heard the crashing of oceans.

  Then she pushed him away.

  “Lindy—”

  “Lent.”

  She made it to the door, and out.

  FOUR

  1.

  When Leon Colby was two years old, his father, a Baptist minister in Cleveland, put a football in his hand. It was a toy football, a little rubber thing, but still pretty substantial for a toddler.

  As the Reverend Calvert Colby liked to tell it, two-year-old Leon took one look at that ball and smiled, love at first sight. But what happened next, Reverend Colby always insisted without hesitation, was the most remarkable thing: young Leon reared back with the ball in his right hand and threw it, hard. Harder than anyone was ready for, most of all the reverend, because it hit him right in the forehead.

  But even that, as legend had it, wasn’t the most incredible thing. It was that Leon Colby, age two, had thrown a tight spiral at his daddy’s head.

  Leon never took the story all that seriously, with his daddy given to tall tales and storytelling. But one thing was sure—he never knew a day when he did not love football.

  It was the competition he craved and loved and embraced. All the way through school and his illustrious UCLA career.

  To Leon Colby, football was all about getting the W.Winning. There was nothing like a hard-earned victory to charge him up.

  That’s why, when he came into the DA’s office, he always tried to get the tough cases. Even when he was doing misdemeanors—your .08 DUIs, your shopliftings—he loved going to court, even if his case was reed thin. Getting in front of a jury was like playing in front of a packed Rose Bowl. No feeling like it in the world.

  But as he’d matured as a prosecutor, he came to see the value of a good disposition. You could dispo certain cases and get the same W on the score sheet, and save yourself for the big game days, the ones that had to go to trial.

  He wasn’t sure yet which would be best for the DiCinni case. Taking it to trial would mean plenty of good pub, but the kid’s age was a wild card. Though the majority of good citizens were fed up with kids murdering other kids, you just never knew what could happen in the court of public opinion.

  Lindy Field was a wild card too. The Marcel Lee case had taken something out of her. Her breakdown was not one of the better-kept secrets in the legal community of Los Angeles. But desperation did strange things to people.

  Sometimes it made them stronger.

  But you had to take things step by step, the same way you did when you learned the new playbook at training camp. And the step this morning was to interview the cop, Glenn, who would be his only LAPD wit at the prelim.

  “So you remember what you wrote in your report?” Colby asked Glenn, a thirtyish officer who had come to Colby’s office for the interview.

  “Sure.”

  “You found the suspect how?”

  “Three guys had him pinned to the ground, in the sandbox.”

  “Pinned to the
sand then.”

  “Huh?”

  “I like specificity, Officer Glenn, understood?”

  The cop looked at him with unsure eyes, which is exactly what he wanted. Shake these young ones up early and they might make decent witnesses later on. Some, of course, were lousy through and through, like birches with tree rot. You couldn’t do much but cut them off and try to minimize the damage in court.

  Glenn cleared his throat. “I think I put it in my report that he was in the sandbox.”

  “Then that’s what you testify to, right?”

  “Yeah.” Showing a little attitude.

  “Now it says here, Officer Glenn”—Colby drew out the name the way a disappointed parent would—“that the suspect was ‘belligerent.’ You know what that word means?”

  Glenn looked at him like he was nuts. “Of course.”

  “What then?”

  “You know, belligerent. Yelling and stuff like that.”

  “Curse words?”

  “Yeah, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah, curse words.”

  Colby lifted the report to the officer’s face. “Where exactly do you say that?”

  Glenn looked at the pages. His attitude began to melt. As planned.

  “It’s not in there,” Colby said, “and if you get on the stand and say anything like that, you’re going to get hosed by the defense. You know who Lindy Field is?”

  Glenn shook his head.

  “Defense lawyer. She used to be good.”

  “Used to be?”

  “She may be again. She has a thing against me.”

  “What thing?”

  “Never mind. But I’m not gonna be on the stand, you are, and if you give her a hole she’ll try to rip it into a door, through which she will stick her foot. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Stick to the report.”

  “Read it again. And again. I want you to know it cold.”

  “Sure.”

  There was something in Glenn’s acquiescence Colby did not like. A smirk maybe, a little power play. Like he was doing Colby a favor just by showing up in the office. Like he had better things to do out on the street.

  Hesitation started a gentle gnaw on the back of Colby’s mind. Jaws of doubt quietly chewing, the sort of reaction he experienced from time to time with cops who played it fast and loose.

  Usually he gave the cops the benefit of the doubt, just to stop the gnawing, but this time his instinct seemed hungrier than usual.

  “One more thing, Glenn. You know there were several wits who gave statements to homicide.”

  “Of course.”

  “Including a couple of the guys who had DiCinni down in the sand.”

  “Yeah.” He said it in a way that sounded like So what?

  “Neither one of them came close to describing the kid as belligerent.”

  Wider eyes now on the cop. “So they didn’t. You know civilians aren’t trained.”

  “Yeah, but one of them, what’s the guy’s name”—he consulted his notes—“Crawford. Crawford said the kid had a stunned look in his eyes, sort of ‘freaky’ he said it was. Said the kid didn’t say anything.”

  “Come on, Leon—”

  “You can call me Mr. Colby.”

  “Sir, you cannot take those statements seriously. All sorts of things were happening. I know what I saw, what I reported, what other people said to me about seeing the kid firing the rifle. It’s all there, that’s all you need, isn’t it?”

  For once Colby agreed with Glenn.“Yeah, Glenn, from you that’s all I need.”

  2.

  Mona sat ramrod straight on the sofa, staring at the TV news and a video of the lawyer defending the killer. Walking into court for the arraignment.

  Brad was eating his dinner—microwaved macaroni and cheese, which he made himself—on a TV tray in front of the recliner.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t watch the news anymore,” he said.

  “She said he isn’t competent! How can they let her say that?”

  “Lawyers represent their clients.”

  “It stinks. She needs to be stopped.” Mona wasn’t eating tonight.

  Skipping meals was getting habitual.

  “Mona, let’s just turn it off, huh?”

  Maybe he wanted an answer this time. Mona gave him one. “And just crawl into a hole? No. Matthew needs us.”

  Brad winced and looked at the floor. His anguished look. Mona hated it. It was like an annoying screech entering her brain.

  “I can’t believe you’re not outraged by this, Brad. What are you thinking?”

  “Honey, I’m trying to keep myself sane. We can’t let this thing get to us.”

  “Why not? Maybe a little anger is just what we need. We have to keep it or we’ll lose.”

  “Anger will up and kill us if we don’t watch out.”

  Now he was moving into his Dr. Phil mode, and she hated that even worse than the manipulative looks he could put on. “Anger at things that deserve it doesn’t hurt anything. We need it. And she deserves it.” Mona nodded at the TV, even though the news program had cut back to one of the talking heads in the studio.

  “Lawyers have jobs to do.We’ll need to get used to that.”

  “It’s not her job to poison a jury by talking like that. I’m going to call Mr. Colby and—”

  “Don’t bother him, Mona. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Brad had on his parent look now, his I-know-what’s-best look. Mona turned away from it and looked at the TV. A Pepto-Bismol commercial had just started.

  “No, Brad. This isn’t just going to run its course. If you can’t see that, I don’t know what.”

  “If I don’t see it? You think I’m clueless or something?”

  “Maybe in denial.” Take that, Dr. Phil.

  “Me in denial? What about you?”

  She whipped him another look. “That’s a rotten thing to say. I’m the very opposite of denial.”

  “Mona—”

  “No. Rotten.” The thing inside took over—the junkyard fire, she had come to call it. Not a clean flame or a purifying blaze. No, this was the kind that burns garbage and sends toxins into the air. It was a poisonous flame, but it was no use trying to put it out. She didn’t even want to. It made her feel alive.

  She got up to leave the room, because walking away from Brad was the best thing when he got this way. Talking more would only make things worse. She wanted to crawl back in her space, the one with the walls that kept people out.

  Besides, she had work to do—stopping this lawyer from trampling on Matthew’s memory. And stop her she would.

  3.

  Cracks in the sidewalk pointed toward the dilapidated house. Made of forgotten clapboard and faded yellow paint, it tucked up against the San Gabriel Mountains in Sunland, about as far as you could get to the north of the San Fernando Valley without actually leaving. Sunland was like a desert community, where houses and trailers were divided by scrub brush and old fences, where the sun seemed to pound like a hammer before splashing into the cool Pacific an hour away.

  Lindy knocked on the screen door, which rattled in its loose hinges. It reminded her of one of those doors on an old farmhouse. But this was Los Angeles County, not Dorothy’s Kansas.

  She heard movement behind the wooden door. The creaking of the floor straining under weight. Then the noise hesitated, as if the person on the other side of the door was waiting for Lindy to do something else. Like leave.

  She knocked again, softly. No need to get anybody riled up.

  “Who is it?” came a deep, scratchy voice, a woman’s voice. From the hack that followed, Lindy guessed she was addressing an inveterate smoker.

  “My name is Lindy Field. I’m here about Darren.”

  There was a long pause. “I got nothing to say.”

  “I want to talk to Drake.”

  The interior door opened a crack, and Lindy could barely make out a face peering through the scree
n. “Drake ain’t here.”

  “I think he is.”

  “You a reporter?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Don’t believe you.”

  “You see any cameras on me? Any recording equipment? All I’ve got is what you see, and you can see it’s just me. So what are you going to do?”

  The woman opened the door a little wider. She wore a drab gray housedress. Her hair was streaked with gray and fell unkempt around a craggy face. Lindy could smell a mixture of tobacco smoke and burned food coming through the screen. She thought of rats.

  The woman looked Lindy up and down. “You don’t look like a lawyer.”

  “I went to law school and passed the bar and everything.”

  Another voice, a man’s voice from within said, “Let her in, Alice.”

  The woman unlatched the screen door and pushed it open slightly. Lindy pulled it open the rest of the way herself.

  She walked into a dark house where all the windows were closed up and curtained. A single lamp on a table provided the only illumination.

  4.

  “Mr. DiCinni, you can’t hide forever.”

  They were sitting now in what would have been called the living room. But the place didn’t look right for living. More like existing.

  “Why not?” Drake DiCinni said. “Whoever wrote that down as some law?” DiCinni had a jutting forehead, was half bald, and wore what hair he had left close to the skin. He looked like he was wearing a rust-colored skull cap. His close-set eyes challenged her from above a small nose, which looked like it had been broken and not set properly.

  The woman called Alice sat in a plastic chair near the kitchen. She had not bothered to introduce herself, nor had Drake DiCinni explained the relationship.

  “The police will be looking for you,” Lindy said.

  “Why? I didn’t shoot anybody.”

  “Your son did. They’ll want to talk to you.”

  “Everybody’s gonna want to talk to me. Isn’t that the way it goes? Shouldn’t I be on Larry King by now? Somebody gets shot in this country, somebody else gets to be a celebrity.”

  “Your son is facing multiple murder charges, Mr. DiCinni. He’s going to need help. Your help.”

  “I can’t help him.”