by Michael Nava
This last thought gave me the most qualms, because it implied knowledge by Bay. Knowledge of what? That her son had killed his father? Or something less clear, but equally damning; maybe that he couldn’t account for his whereabouts the night Chris was killed or simply that he had expressed his hatred for Chris to her in a way that frightened her for him. Only she knew the answer to that, and once she learned that I was representing Zack, she wouldn’t be telling me.
Of course, my entire theory of Joey’s putative guilt was as flimsy as a house of cards. He had only to provide an alibi and I was back to square one and who did that leave? Bligh? That was even a further stretch. Who else? As Zack pointed out, Chris kept secrets. I knew that better than anyone. The problem was that he had taken his secrets to his grave.
17
I BEGAN WITH THE autopsy report. It was hard going because I’d read a sentence, then remember it was Chris whose body was being dissected, and have to stop. I reminded myself that somewhere in the mass of clinical details I might find clues about how Chris had been killed that would help me prepare a defense. That made it easier, but I was glad the D.A. hadn’t provided me with the medical examiner’s pictures.
The M.E. had attributed the cause of death to multiple skull fractures to the back of Chris’s head by a blunt object. The fractures had caused internal bleeding; his brain had been drowned in its own blood. There was an absence of defensive wounds or abrasions, suggesting he’d been taken by surprise by the first blow and either stunned or knocked unconscious. There was a bruise on the right side of his face, apparently caused when he fell to the floor, face down. The M.E. noted that the body had been found face up, suggesting that it had been moved post-mortem. That was Zack, turning Chris over. Time of death was estimated to be between 10:00 P.M. and midnight.
A toxicological analysis of Chris’s blood revealed a blood alcohol level of .12, a reading that made him legally intoxicated. For someone of Chris’s height and weight, that meant a lot of drinks consumed over a fairly short period of time. The medical examiner had also found partially digested food in his stomach, suggesting a recent meal.
A mental picture began to emerge of that night. Chris had gone to the court sometime in the evening, worked for a bit, and then gone out to dinner. Either before dinner or with dinner he’d had several drinks, enough to have felt his liquor. I had never known Chris to be a solitary drinker or much of a drinker at all, particularly after Bay stopped. It was hard for me to see him sitting alone in a restaurant going through a bottle of wine. I liked another explanation: that he’d met someone for dinner, someone whom he’d felt the need to face on a few drinks.
His killer had struck him from the back, taking Chris by surprise. The combination of the first blow and the liquor had stunned him because he hadn’t put up a fight. His murderer had struck another half-dozen blows before he left. The killer was someone Chris knew and who had access to the courthouse. I had been assuming it was someone who had met Chris at the courthouse. Maybe, though, it was the same person with whom he’d had dinner, and then they’d gone back to the courthouse together. Someone, a guard, another judge working at the courthouse late, might have seen Chris going to dinner or returning. I made a note to follow up on that.
I set the coroner’s report aside and flipped through the remaining reports until I found the search warrant that had authorized the search of Zack’s apartment. Challenging the warrant would be my first line of defense because, if successful, I could exclude the obelisk and the bloody clothes and gut the prosecution’s case. There would then be no trial and no pointing the finger of guilt at Joey Chandler.
I found the officer’s affidavit, the document that was supposed to provide probable cause to the judge who issued the warrant. I scanned down to the signature line and was not surprised to see Yolanda McBeth’s name. I went back to the top of the page and began to read. Immediately, the words “anonymous citizen informant” jumped off the page.
“On October 12th, your affiant received a call from an anonymous citizen informant who resides in the same apartment complex as the suspect but who declined to further identify himself,” she had written. “The informant told your affiant that on October 8 at approximately 1 o’clock in the morning he was sitting at his kitchen table in his apartment on the second floor of the building when he saw the suspect pass in front of his window. The informant said the suspect’s shirt front was smeared with what appeared to be blood and he was clutching an object in his right hand described by the informant as made of stone. The informant said he could see clearly because of the overhead lighting in the hallway outside the window. The informant told your affiant that he went to the door of his apartment and opened it wide enough to have a view of the suspect entering his apartment. His observations at that time confirmed the bloodied shirt and stone object. The informant said that shortly after, there was a severe earthquake that caused considerable damage to the apartment complex and he, along with the other tenants, including the suspect, exited the complex to the street. The informant told your affiant that he observed the suspect had changed his shirt. The informant said he attempted to engage the suspect in conversation, but the suspect appeared nervous and, without reentering his apartment, got into his vehicle and left the area. The informant said that the tenants were subsequently evacuated from the building because of structural damage and have only been allowed to return for a few minutes to recover personal items. The informant told your affiant that he watched for the suspect but, that to his knowledge, the suspect did not return to the building. The informant said he subsequently learned of Judge Chandler’s murder from the newspaper and recognized him from his picture as the man whom he had sometimes seen in the suspect’s company in the past six months.
“The informant stated that he did not wish to identify himself because he feared for his personal safety should the suspect learn he had spoken to the police. Your affiant attempted to assure the informant he would be protected if he stepped forward, but the informant terminated the conversation at that point. Attempts to trace the call were unsuccessful. Your affiant has personally attempted to interview all the second-floor tenants of the building, but this task has been made impossible by the fact that the building has been evacuated and the former tenants have scattered, some of them remaining at temporary shelters while others have apparently left the area. None of the tenants whom your affiant has been able to interview have admitted to being the informant. The suspect has apparently fled the jurisdiction. It is your affiant’s belief that the objects which the informant observed the suspect to have been in possession of the night of the murder, e.g., the bloodied clothing and the stone object, remain in the suspect’s apartment.”
I stopped reading, sipped my now-cold coffee and reviewed what I remembered about the legal status of searches conducted on the basis of anonymous tips. When I’d first started practicing law, the courts had been extremely suspicious of these kinds of searches because of the obvious danger that the police had simply manufactured the anonymous tips they were based on. As a result, the courts had adopted complicated rules that made anonymous tip warrants difficult to obtain. After a decade and a half of conservative Supreme Court majorities chipping away at the exclusionary rule, the old rigid standard to which this kind of search warrant would once have been subjected had been replaced by a sloppy “totality of the circumstances” test designed to give the cops plenty of leeway in justifying the search. Virtually all that survived of the old rules was the requirement that the police produce some independent corroborative evidence in support of the anonymous tip.
I returned to the affidavit in search of McBeth’s corroboration. She’d confirmed that Zack was the lessee of the apartment she wanted to search, but that wasn’t corroborative of what she expected to find in it. Apparently realizing this, she’d included a paragraph explaining why she believed Zack might be the killer, including, I noted, that “suspect had a homosexual relationship with the decedent.” Zack was a queer
, ergo, he was a murderer. For good measure, she mentioned that Zack was a beneficiary of Chris’s will; he was not just a queer, but a greedy one.
She described Chris’s head wounds and speculated that they were the result of his having been bludgeoned by the informant’s stone object. She speculated further that the stone object was “an award decedent received from the county bar association. According to decedent’s court clerk, the award was a marble obelisk that decedent kept on his desk and which was missing from the scene when his body was found.” She also included her observation that, from the amount of blood at the crime scene, “it is likely the killer would have been bloodied, explaining the blood the informant noticed on the suspect’s shirt.”
So there it was, her corroboration: blunt force head trauma, a homosexual relationship, a possible monetary motive, a missing award and a bloody death. Of themselves, those observations would never have justified issuing a search warrant for Zack’s apartment. As corroboration, they were still pretty thin. The missing obelisk, for instance. When had Chris’s court clerk last seen it? How did the clerk know he hadn’t taken it home sometime before the murder? How did McBeth know that what her informant had seen was the same object without a more detailed description either of the obelisk or the informant’s stone object? What about color, size, dimensions, weight? Why hadn’t she attempted to gather this information from whoever had given Chris the award? Why wasn’t there anything about the kind of injury Chris had received to support her conclusion that the obelisk was a possible weapon? Wouldn’t so bizarre a murder weapon have made distinctive wounds? Where was the medical examiner’s affidavit? Why couldn’t he have been struck by a club or a knife or even the ashtray he kept in his desk drawer?
Her conclusion about the blood on Zack’s shirt could also be attacked. Wouldn’t there have been a particular kind of splattering from the blows Chris received? Would there have been drops or puddles? Did either correspond to the blood on Zack’s shirt that the informant had observed? Couldn’t it have been Zack’s own blood from a cut? Would it have been fresh or dried by the time the informant supposedly saw it?
The issuing judge had not asked himself these questions before he signed the warrant and now another judge would decide whether he should have. The biggest obstacle, however, was not the sufficiency of McBeth’s warrant, but the fact that she had found the obelisk in Zack’s apartment. The reviewing judge was not supposed to take this into consideration. That judge was required to place herself in the position of the judge who issued the warrant and determine, de novo, whether the affidavit supplied probable cause. As a practical matter, it would be hard for the judge to put out of her mind that McBeth’s anonymous tip had panned out. A lot would ride on who the judge was. The preliminary hearing would take place in the municipal court before a judge named Torres-Jones, about whom I knew nothing. I could bring the suppression motion as part of the prelim or wait until we reached Superior Court for trial. I tucked my papers into my briefcase and went off to the county law library on First Street to research Torres-Jones.
She’d been on the municipal court for fifteen years. She was one of a number of muni court judges who’d been appointed by the last Democratic governor, a liberal, and then languished there through the administrations of his right-wing Republican successors. The Republicans appointed ex-District Attorneys while Torres-Jones, in addition to being a Democrat, was a former Public Defender. Ex-P.D.s were thought to be unreliable on law-and-order issues but more often than not, once they became judges, they earned reputations as harsh sentencers. The reason was that they’d heard all the bullshit from criminal defendants when they represented them and were less likely to be swayed by it on the bench. Torres-Jones had such a reputation, but she was also known for being tough on cops. On the other hand, her most recent judicial profile mentioned that she planned to run for the Superior Court next time there was a vacant seat. These days, judicial candidates liked to have police endorsements to assure the paranoid public that they were on the right side of the law. This was going to be a high-profile case and she might not want to be the judge who suppressed crucial evidence. That, of course, would be true of any judge who heard the suppression motion, since they all had to stand for reelection sooner or later.
I studied the headshot that accompanied her profile. She had a pleasant, plump face framed by a mass of dark hair threaded with gray. She was fifty-three years old. As a lawyer she’d been active in the women’s and Latino bar associations and as a judge she’d served on the state bar’s commission on gender equality and served two terms as presiding judge of the municipal court. A good old-fashioned liberal; no wonder her career was stalled. I decided to set the suppression hearing before her.
18
THE NEXT DAY I met with my investigator, Freeman Vidor. I knew Freeman had an office because I’d been to it once, a fly-specked, dusty two-room suite in a crumbling building on Broadway straight out of Raymond Chandler, but he preferred to do business at bars. His favorite, a cop bar called the Code Seven, had gone out of business, but he’d found a replacement, an equally dark and gin-soaked dive on First Street called the Rolling Rock Cafe. He was already there when I arrived, at a corner table, peering over half-glasses at the stock market listings in the Wall Street Journal.
I’d known Freeman for seven years and he hadn’t changed at all. He was a black man—he didn’t go in for African-American—in late middle age, fast-talking, reed-thin and very smart. He’d been a cop with the LAPD in the dark ages of Darryl Gates and his equally benighted predecessors, when racism had not only run rampant but had had the status of unofficial department policy. No unassuming Tom Bradley, Freeman had made waves and quickly found himself unpromotable, so he’d quit and gone into business for himself. He was very good at his work. He told me once the secret of his success as a private investigator was the same thing that worked against him as a cop, the assumption by white people that they were smarter than he was. It made them careless around him, which, as many of them subsequently discovered, was a real mistake.
We were friendly but not friends, because Freeman didn’t have friends. That I was gay had never seemed to register with him one way or another. He was an equal-opportunity misanthrope.
“When did you start wearing glasses?” I asked, pulling out a chair across from him.
“When I got old,” he said, folding the paper.
“You play the market?”
“It’s my retirement,” he replied. “You oughta start thinking about that.”
“What would I retire to? My rose garden?”
“So, you’re all tangled up with this dead judge,” he said. “I hear the cops have got the boyfriend down for it. You working on a slow plea or do you have something up your sleeve?”
“He didn’t do it,” I said.
Freeman flashed his yellow teeth and signaled the waitress. “Double bourbon for me,” he told her. “My friend will have a Roy Rogers.”
“Coffee would be fine,” I said.
When he was settled with his drink, he lit a Kool and said, “So?”
I told him the whole story.
“Go over that last part again,” he said, when I was done. “The part that proves the boyfriend didn’t do it.”
“Not proof,” I reminded him. “Reasonable doubt.”
“Yeah, that part.”
“Okay. Chris leaves the courthouse and goes out to meet someone for dinner, Mr. X. Chris has a lot to drink, maybe X does, too, and they return to the courthouse together. They quarrel. Chris turns his back on X, and X picks up the obelisk and knocks Chris down. He hits him a few more times, then, when he realizes he’s killed him, he panics and runs. Some time later, Zack arrives, sees Chris on the ground. He picks up the obelisk and turns him over and sees that he’s dead. Then Zack panics and leaves. X, meanwhile, has had time to calm down and realizes that his prints are on the obelisk. Maybe he’s left other evidence, too, from which he could be identified, so he makes himself go bac
k. Zack said he nearly collided with someone entering the courthouse garage in a big, four-wheel-drive vehicle. Thinking about it last night, I realized the driver could’ve recognized Zack. Anyway, X removes the obelisk. Since he knows Zack was there, he decides to frame him for the murder and plant the obelisk at his apartment. Now, there’s a period of a couple of days when Zack’s apartment building is empty. X could’ve gotten into his apartment and left the obelisk without being detected. Then,” I concluded, “he calls McBeth as the anonymous tipster and tells her about the obelisk and the bloody clothes. She gets the warrant, finds the stuff and arrests Zack.”
“Wow,” he said, rattling the ice in his drink. “You got everything but dancing bears.” He took a sip and set the glass down. “Now, let me ask you a few questions.”
I sat back and waited for him to tear my story apart. It’s what I counted on him for.
“You don’t know he went out to eat or where or if he was with someone or by himself.”
“That’s your job.”
“I’ll come back to that,” he said. “You don’t know if he came back to the court with someone or alone.”
“A guard or someone else working late at the court might have seen him.”
“Didn’t the cops ask about that?”
