Sins of the Fathers

by James Scott Bell

  “He can’t help him,”Alice said.

  “Alice, I can handle this.”

  “My house.”

  “Just let me.” He looked at Lindy, his eyes hollow. “I don’t want to testify in court or anything.”

  “This is your son we’re talking about, sir. His life.”

  “His life is over, don’t you get that? I tried. His whole life I tried. After his mother ran out, I tried. After he got in trouble at every school he ever went to, I tried. But he’s bad. He was born bad.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “You got any kids?”

  Lindy shook her head.

  “Then don’t tell me. I got the blood of six people on my hands, ’cause I brought him into the world.”

  “You really should go,” Alice said.

  “No,” Lindy said. “Not yet.”

  With a sigh, DiCinni looked at Alice. “Let me talk to her.”

  “Go ahead, if you want to.”

  “Alone.”

  Alice scowled at Lindy. “I don’t like this.”

  Drake turned in his chair. Lindy saw a blue tattoo on the back of his neck. A spiderweb. “It’ll be all right,” Drake said.

  “I’ll be in the back,”Alice said. “You need me, holler.”

  I’m not going to bite him, lady.

  The woman in the gray dress walked out of the room, dripping attitude.

  “So what do you want?” DiCinni said.

  Lindy took a legal pad out of her briefcase and clicked open a ballpoint pen. “Start by telling me about Darren, his mother, you, his birth. Start there.”

  DiCinni stared into space, his lips tightening. “His mother ran out. When he was barely a year old. What kind of a woman does that?”

  “What was her name?”

  “I don’t want to talk about her.”

  “Just the name?”

  “Look it up.”

  Was this going to be the drill? She’d ask a question and get a head butt in return? One of her old law professors, Everett Woodard, used to tell the class you shouldn’t rep somebody unless you walked a mile in his moccasins. Tried to get in his head, understand his life situation. Same for key witnesses. Do that,Woodard used to say, and you’ll be well ahead of the other guy.

  She tried to put herself in Drake DiCinni’s moccasins. The guy’s son had just murdered six people. Something that bad happens to a man, he’s going to be messed up.

  “Mr. DiCinni, I don’t want to make things hard on you,” Lindy said. “I just want to get at the facts here, best I can. And then leave you alone.”

  He shook his head and looked at the floor. “Trudy,” he said. “She was a hooker. I was working as a bartender. She used to come into my place all the time. I’d listen to her. She liked that. I saw something in her. Maybe it was just that she talked to me nice. Nobody did much of that when I was growing up.”

  “Where was this?” Lindy said. “Where you were a bartender?”

  “Vegas.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I guess we sort of circled around each other then figured out we were maybe in love. You don’t need to hear the whole thing. She got pregnant and wanted to get married. Funny, huh? Just like in the old days. The chick wants to get married. So we did. But I made her go into detox first, and she wanted to.”

  “What was she hooked on?”

  “Meth.”

  Lindy jotted a note. Brain damage? Mother on drugs.

  “Anyway,” DiCinni said, “this and that, Darren is born and—”

  “Was he okay? I mean, any details of the birth that you need to tell me about?”

  “Nothing. He was a little small, I guess.”

  “How small?”

  “I don’t remember that stuff.”

  “Go on.”

  DiCinni heaved a deep breath. “Look, we didn’t have much to live on, she couldn’t get a job. I don’t know, the pressure. You’re in a one-room with a baby all the time. She couldn’t take it, so she just leaves.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Dead.”

  “How?”

  “She went back to the old life. Some cop calls me one night at three in the morning, says she’s been found in an alley. Good riddance, I say.”

  Sentimental fellow. Lindy tried to imagine him testifying in court.

  What impression would he make? Would it help or hurt Darren?

  “Let’s talk about the gun,” Lindy said. “How’d Darren get it?”

  “I kept it locked up. The lock was broken. The cops must have figured that out.”

  “I don’t know what the cops have figured out yet.”

  “Well, that’s what happened. I used the thing for hunting. I actually hunt and eat what I bag.”

  “Not much hunting around here, is there?”

  DiCinni shrugged. “I haven’t done much lately.”

  “You show Darren how to shoot?”

  “I took him a couple of times, sure. Out in the desert. But I taught him to respect the gun, what it could do, and never to use it when I wasn’t around.”

  “Was Darren a problem the last few years? Around home?”

  “Nothing that’d make you think he’d ever do something like this.”

  “Is there anything you can think of, anything at all, that can help me understand why Darren would ever do such a thing?”

  Drake DiCinni’s mind suddenly seemed to shift to a different place, the way an abrupt realization momentarily takes over the body. The air seemed to snap with static, with an electric charge that felt like the key to the whole case.

  But just as suddenly Drake’s face changed from comprehension to disregard. “What are you asking me that for?”

  “Because,” Lindy said, “you are in the best position to know.”

  Drake stood up. “Get out. I have nothing more to say to you.”

  “Mr. DiCinni—”

  “I’m through talking.”

  “You have to help him.”

  “He can’t be helped, don’t you get that? You’re just a little cog in a big machine. You think you’re in control of anything on earth? You control nothing. Now get out of here and leave me alone.”

  5.

  Riding to Roxy’s, Lindy thought about the hatchet jobs some fathers did on their kids. She felt her own wound again, knowing she always would. There was no medicine for it, for what fathers did.

  Roxy Raymond lived in an apartment on Sherman Way in Canoga Park. Not the best section of town, but a good place for getting back on your feet after visiting the abyss. Roxy had been an investigator with the PD’s office when Lindy was there, but an addiction to Ecstasy ended that. Lindy helped Roxy through the detox.

  Roxy opened her door holding a red can. “I’m hunting cockroaches. Come join the fun.”

  Roxy had some sort of Mediterranean blood in her, mixed strikingly with a large dollop of Scandinavian. Long black hair, dark skin, sky blue eyes. Lindy knew it was the kind of look that drove men mad, made them do crazy things in the night or conjure wild dreams in daylight.

  “You don’t have to do the cockroach thing,” Roxy said. “But if you see one, yell, ’cause I’m in the mood to kill. These babies are big.”

  Her apartment was simple, eclectic. Roxy had her watercolors, unframed, attached to the walls, and some kind of unidentifiable fabric on the floor doing an imitation of a rug. The place smelled of incense and dishwater. R&B played softly in the background.

  And on the coffee table, which had various scuffs, lay a big, black book.

  “I’m glad you called,” Roxy said. “Let’s go do something. I’m feeling cramped in here.”

  Lindy eyed the black book as she sat on the sofa. “Since when are you reading the Bible?”

  “Since a month.” Roxy tossed herself on a beanbag chair that might have done duty in the Berkeley of the sixties.

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “Met a guy.”

  “A Bible salesman?”
>
  “An artist, wiseacre.”

  “He’s got you reading the Bible?”

  Roxy pointed at herself with both index fingers. “I took the plunge. Baptized and everything.”

  “Like in water?”

  “Duh.”

  Lindy was amazed, but only somewhat. Roxy did have a spontaneous personality.

  “Hey, come to church with us.” Roxy sat up, like she’d just had the greatest idea in the world.

  “Church?”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t been in a church since . . .” Since her mother died.

  “Come on. We have a great minister—”

  “Who is this guy? Where’d you meet him?”

  “At group.”

  “He’s an addict?”

  “Nah, he was there supporting a friend of his. We started talking, one thing led to another . . .”

  “And boom, you’re Mother Teresa.”

  “Hey now . . .”

  “Sorry. I’m a little tense. You got anything to drink?”

  “Like what?”

  “I was thinking of the hard stuff. Dr Pepper.”

  “I’ve got diet.”

  “I said the hard stuff. ”

  “Sorry, chica. You have to drive.”

  Roxy went into the kitchen and returned with a couple glasses of Diet Dr Pepper.

  “You ready to go back to work?” Lindy asked.

  “Yeah baby!”

  “I might have a case for you to help me with.”

  “What kind?”

  “Murder.”

  Roxy whistled.

  “If I take it. It’s the boy who shot those kids in the park.”

  Roxy froze midgulp. She lowered her glass silently.

  Lindy told Roxy what she knew so far, up through the interview with Drake DiCinni.

  “Guy sounds like a real loser,” Roxy said.

  “And that’s what’s sticking in my throat.”

  Lindy looked into her friend’s Nordic eyes, which had a difference about them now. Aknowingness. Roxy didn’t look as confused or vulnerable as she had the last time Lindy saw her. Maybe it was her new boyfriend.

  “Take the case,” Roxy said, “and do what God meant you to do.”

  Lindy shook her head. “How’d God get into this?”

  “He’s into everything. That’s something I found out.”

  “Oh yeah? Why didn’t I get the memo?”

  “It’s all in here.” Roxy picked up the Bible.

  And that’s when a little snap went off inside Lindy. She had always believed in something out there, even flirted with Christianity in high school. But that seemed a long time ago.

  “Does it say in there how come God let this kid turn out the way he did? How come he let this father even have a kid?”

  Roxy looked a little pained. “I know there’s hard questions.”

  “Well, when you get an answer to any of ’em, let me know. And while you’re at it, let me know why I got the father I got.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Forget it.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “Why?”

  “You come here and drink my Dr Pepper, you ask me to work for you. And you’re my friend. You got me through a rough time. Maybe I can do something for you.”

  Lindy leaned back and looked at the ceiling. She’d never talked about it, not with anyone.

  “So I had a lousy father,” Lindy said. “It’s not like I’m the only one.”

  “Come on.”

  “What’s the big deal? He drank, he beat my mom up, he beat—”

  Lindy stopped suddenly, an unwelcome memory unfurling in her mind. She closed her eyes, fighting it back. “Forget it.”

  “Hey, girl, I’m sorry I—”

  “Forget it, I said.” Lindy, embarrassed, wiped the wetness in her eyes with the back of her hand.

  A long, penetrating silence passed. In that silence, ideas fell and shifted inside Lindy’s mind, a rearrangement of mental furniture. Her assumptions changed, and she regarded the changes and knew what she had to do.

  “I’m taking the case,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”

  FIVE

  1.

  “Please try to talk.”

  Mona shook her head. It felt empty, like her heart.

  “I don’t mean to push you,” Brad said.

  But he did, and Mona knew it. She also knew this was hurting him. She didn’t want to hurt him. She loved him. They’d had one child, Matthew, born after two miscarriages.

  She loved him but she was not ready to talk about it.

  “We are going to get through this,” Brad said. He reached across the table—the dining room table she had found at a garage sale early in their marriage and had restored herself, a table set with a banquet of fond memories. She did not reach halfway.

  “Brad, I’m sorry. I just need more time.”

  “I know. We both do.”

  In the silence Mona heard the clock ticking on top of the refrigerator. She’d picked that up at the same garage sale. For fifty cents. Strange how clearly she could remember that.

  “Let’s just talk about something,” Brad said. “Anything.”

  Mona took a sip of coffee. It was lukewarm.

  Brad picked up the front page of the Daily News. “Did you see this? There’s a group up in Santa Cruz, wants to bring a lawsuit on behalf of overweight pets. Going after owners, the pet food industry, even—”

  Mona closed her eyes.

  “—the pounds. Hey, that’s kind of a joke, isn’t it? Overweight. Pounds.”

  Mona rubbed her temples.

  “You know who I think is behind it? The Atkins people. Wouldn’t that be a great conspiracy theory?”

  Nodding her head, Mona tried to smile for him. But she couldn’t.

  The mirror was not doing her any favors. She could hardly stand to look at herself. Where once her copper-colored eyes had reflected light, they now seemed muddy, like the streets of a southern town after a flood. Had she cried enough tears to wash the light from them?

  And where once she had a face that people said looked younger than her thirty-eight years (“You could have been an actress or a model,” Brad used to tell her), she now fought every wrinkle. The scar near the corner of her mouth was where a precancerous growth had been cut out by her HMO surgeon two years ago. The scar had always looked like a dimple to her, but that was when she was looking through eyes that could still see hope. Now they saw every flaw on her face and the gray strands showing up in her auburn hair.

  She was able to go through the motions of humanity—to walk, to speak, to give the impression of rational thought. But behind the movement she wandered, dazed, lost in her own illusion, the inhabitant of permanent nightmare. And when she paused to reflect, she threatened to topple into a bottomless, empty pit.

  And God would not save her from falling. He was not above; he was not present. If anything, he was below the pit and silent.

  She remembered reading about some theologians’ concept of God as being powerless to intervene in life. Things happened that were bad, and God grieved along with the rest of us.

  At the time she’d shaken her head and even said something to Brad about how loony some people were, even people who taught at the university level. Maybe especially people who taught at the university level. And Brad had laughed, being a graduate of UC Berkeley and knowing full well that the hallowed halls of higher learning were rife with a brand of theism that birthed cancer in the soul. “I believe I had Satan for freshman biology,” Brad used to say. “He used to grade us with a pitchfork.”

  Now she wasn’t laughing. Maybe these theologians and academics had a point. Maybe this whole Christianity thing was an exercise in denial.

  She didn’t say so to Brad, of course. He’d worry and start yapping about getting some counseling, and she just couldn’t handle that right now. She did not want his strength, rooted as it was in a doctrine she could
not confirm. She did not know what she wanted.

  She knew she didn’t want to go to church that Sunday. It was too soon, and she didn’t want everybody coming up to her with hugs and wishes and tears and offers of dinner and anything else they could do. She wanted to be alone with her grief.

  But Brad insisted in his gentle but firm way that she go. And a very small part of her thought, Okay, I’ll give God a chance, but he betternot blow it this time. He could have saved Matthew, and he didn’t.

  2.

  The church stood on a hillside north of the Valley, just off the 118 freeway. And from the looks of things, it was a pretty popular place.

  Cars streamed into the parking lot. Lindy, holding her Starbucks in hand like it was a magic back-from-the-dead elixir, hoped Roxy would be able to find a spot without bending a fender. She was so excited about seeing her guy, she was giddy.

  Lindy hadn’t been sure what to wear and settled on her closing-argument suit, a dark blue pinstripe ensemble with skirt and coat, very conservative. She needed juries to believe there was a little conservatism inside her, especially by the end of her trials. The conservative image was usually a tough sell, but at least she could dress the part.

  The auditorium was getting packed quickly. Roxy, wearing more makeup than usual and dressed in, of all things, a dress, gazed around the crowd like a meerkat.

  “I don’t see him.”

  Lindy smoothed her blouse. “No hurry.”

  “You seem a little anxious.”

  “Anxious? I look anxious?”

  “Like a CEO on 60 Minutes. ”

  “I’m in foreign land here.”

  “We don’t eat our young.”

  A nice-looking young man with wavy blond hair handed Lindy a program and showed a row of white teeth.

  “Welcome,” he said. He looked about twenty.

  “Thanks,” Lindy said.

  The young man pointed to Lindy’s Starbucks cup. “Want me to take that for you?”

  “You try, I’ll bite your arm off.”

  The smile disappeared.

  “Kidding,” Lindy said. “Here, I’ll kill it for you.” She downed the remainder and handed the guy the cup. He took it and hurried off, as if he couldn’t wait to pass out programs in another part of the lobby.

  “Friendly joint,” Lindy said.

  Roxy almost jumped in the air. “There he is!”