by Michael Nava
Freeman said, “What?”
“Nothing,” I said, because I didn’t understand myself what I meant. “You’re right. It’s creepy. Let’s get out of here.”
We got out of the building undetected. Back in the garage, I walked Freeman to his car.
“Want a lift?” he asked.
“No, I’m just out on the street. Have you had any luck finding out whether Chris had dinner with someone the night he was killed?”
He shook his head. “I got his clerk to give me the names of his five favorite restaurants, but I haven’t finished checking them out.”
“What about the Epicenter?” I asked.
“It’s on my list,” he said.
“Have you talked to Joey Chandler?”
“Tried to,” he grunted. “I did like you suggested and went out to USC and caught him between classes. He wanted to know if I was the police and when I told him I wasn’t, he said he didn’t have to talk to me. Period.”
“So we still don’t know if he has an alibi or not?”
“Nope,” he agreed.
“And McBeth? What did you find out about her?”
“She’s a detective two,” he said, “and she got there in record time.”
“What’s her reputation?”
“She’s a black woman on the fast track,” he said. “What do you think? Her brothers in blue figure she’s an affirmative action baby and they don’t like that. Plus, she’s cozy with the chief and you know how most of the rank-and-file feel about him.”
I nodded. The current chief was a black man brought in from the outside after Darryl Gates had been forced to resign following the Rodney King fiasco. He was deeply unpopular, particularly with white and Latino officers who accused him of favoring African-Americans. Relationships between those groups had deteriorated to the point that the black police officer association had brought a civil-rights action against the police union in federal court.
“What about her work? Is she a corner-cutter?”
“She’s ambitious,” he said. “Ambition affects different people in different ways. Some get extra-careful, some fudge a little.”
“And McBeth?”
“No major beefs there, but you know that there’s people laying in wait.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and this is a big case for her.”
Freeman grinned. “I’d hate to be the guy that brought a sister down.”
“I could give this piece of the investigation to someone else.”
“Screw it,” he said, lighting a Kool. “I never claimed to be politically correct.”
“No,” I said, “that’s my job.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “You’re kind of a poster child for the politically correct, aren’t you?”
“Keep in touch,” I said. He got into his car and gunned his way out of the lot.
That night, I had a dream. In the dream, I found myself in the garage. It was dark and empty and as I stood there it seemed to close in on me until, in a panic, I started searching for a way out. In the distance, I saw a door. The door was cracked open enough to see there was light on the other side. I walked toward it, feeling the darkness tighten around me. I reached the door, but when I raised my hand to pull it open, something stopped me, a noise coming from the other side. It was a squishy sound, like the sound of something trying to pull itself out of the mud. I knelt down and peered through the crack and saw Chris Chandler sprawled on the floor while a man knelt over him and slammed a marble obelisk into the back of his head, making the soft, muddy noise I had heard. The man’s back was to me and I could see nothing of his face. Jets of blood sprayed the walls. I recoiled and bumped into someone who had come in the darkness behind me. I turned and looked. It was Joey Chandler.
The next morning, as I was still puzzling over the meaning of the dream, the phone rang. I picked it up and before I could speak, a woman said, “Please hold for Joseph Kimball.”
A moment later, Chris’s father-in-law, Bay’s father and one of the most powerful lawyers in the city was saying, “Henry? Joe Kimball here. I think we need to talk.”
He made it sound as if we chatted regularly when, in fact, I had probably spoken to him a dozen times in twenty years.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Kimball?”
“Your investigator was out at USC talking to my grandson.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m representing the man accused of murdering Chris.”
“So I’m given to understand,” he said, with faint but unmistakable distaste. “I don’t know what possible light Joey can shed on your defense of this man.”
“If he’d talked to my investigator it would’ve become apparent.”
There was a pause. “You know, my daughter asked me to call you because she’s too angry to speak to you herself.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I don’t mean to hurt her any further, but I don’t believe my client killed Chris and I’m obliged to pursue every possible avenue of defense.”
“And which avenue takes you to my grandson?”
“This is not something I want to discuss on the phone,” I replied.
Another pause. “I see. Could you come to my office tomorrow morning? Say, eleven.”
“That will be fine,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “See you then.”
I put the phone down. Joe Kimball was out of the reach of most mortals. He didn’t so much practice law as trade favors, and they were the kind of favors for which rules were bent and formalities overlooked. He wouldn’t have called unless he was ready to deal, and he made the kind of offers that one could not refuse.
The elevator deposited me at Kimball’s law offices on the twenty-third floor of the Wells Fargo Building. The windows of the foyer looked out upon the palm-tree-dotted, sun-baked, polyglot sprawl that was Los Angeles. The room’s furnishings evoked a different world, with its dark woods, deep carpeting and eighteenth-century ancestor portraits, as if Kimball’s firm consisted of solicitous pin-striped-suited gentlemen who spent their days revising codicils for elderly widows. In fact, however, Kimball & Casey employed four hundred lawyers in a half-dozen offices across the state working tirelessly on behalf of banks, big businesses and the handful of exceedingly rich individuals who could afford Kimball’s hourly rates.
This was the world Chris had inhabited before he became a judge. Joe Kimball had taken to him like a son and his rise through the firm had been meteoric and, he liked to point out, merited. Still, as Kimball’s son-in-law, he had been something of an heir apparent and he had been treated as such by the other partners and the young associates who fought for his attention. He’d enjoyed that, just as he’d enjoyed the trappings of his success. More than the pleasure he got from them, they were proof that he’d made the right decision when he’d married Bay. He was right that, had he been openly gay, he would never have achieved the same level of success in the clubby culture of the city’s ruling class. I never saw that it was the worth of sacrifice. There’s a line from A Man for All Seasons, near the end of the play, when the protagonist, Sir Thomas More, remarks to a man who has perjured himself and sealed More’s doom in exchange for the governorship of Wales that it profited a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, “but for Wales?” That summed up my feelings about Chris’s membership in this particular club.
“Mr. Kimball will see you now,” the receptionist murmured. “His office is at the end of the hall.”
The first time I laid eyes on Joe Kimball, when I was still a law student, I’d christened him, privately, the silver man. His hair was silver, as were his gray eyes in a certain light, and he was wearing a beautifully cut silvery-gray suit. As he rose from behind his desk to greet me, he was still silvery and smooth, though I realized he must now be in his late sixties or early seventies. Since it was Saturday he wore khakis and a blue blazer over a pink polo shirt, but even casually dressed he had the air of a man accustomed to deference. I recognized in his appearance th
e jocular masculinity that prevails among the men of the old rich, for whom pink is an amusing color for men’s shirts but homosexuality is gender treason.
His was a bastion of male privilege in which women functioned mainly as decoration. It was true that his firm had a small number of women partners, but they were window dressing. I knew this not from Chris but from Bay, who had all her life felt discounted by her father because she was female. She once told me that it seemed her entire purpose had been to marry and bring a son into the family.
Sometime in the last decade, I remembered, Kimball’s wife had died and he’d remarried a woman twenty years his junior. There was the obligatory silver-framed photograph of her on the credenza behind his desk, along with others of Bay and Joey, but none of Chris. The new wife was pictured in jodhpurs on a chestnut horse, riding crop in hand. Her smile was slightly impatient and a little forced. His, as he offered me coffee, was one of practiced sincerity.
“Yes,” I said. “Black, please.”
“Good man,” he replied, picked up the phone and requested two cups.
A moment later, a thirtyish ash-blonde in a yellow cashmere cable-knit sweater and cream-colored slacks brought in a tray with the coffee poured into fragile bone china. She set them down before us and asked, “Anything else?”
“No, that’s all,” he said, smiling at her with a sexual warmth. She basked in that smile. I wondered if the jodhpured wife knew.
I sipped his excellent coffee, thanked him for making time to see me, and added, “Also, I wanted to express my sympathy to you on Chris’s death.”
His expression curdled. “Yes, it was a shock,” he said. “But you didn’t come here for condolences.”
“No,” I said. “I came here to talk about Joey. You know I’m defending Zack Bowen, the man accused of killing Chris.”
“Bowen,” he said, “I went to school with someone by that name.”
“I doubt it’s the same family,” I replied. “The preliminary hearing’s set for next week. I’ve made a motion to suppress certain evidence and unless I prevail on it, I imagine he’ll be held to answer and a trial date set.”
“I do know something about criminal procedure,” he said a bit impatiently.
“My client is innocent,” I said, forging on. “He had no reason to kill Chris, but your grandson did.”
He sat back in his chair, the leather yielding to his imposing frame. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“Mr. Kimball, I’m not the police and I’m not the prosecutor. It’s not my job to bring Chris’s killer to justice, whatever that may mean in this situation. My job is to get my client off and I’ll do it any way I can, but I’d rather not implicate Joey in the process.”
He stared at me with chilly displeasure. It was as if a cloud was passing over the sun. “Do you have evidence of this absurd claim against my grandson?”
“I do,” I said.
“What is it?”
“You know I can’t answer that,” I said, “but the evidence does exist. I will say at this point it’s not strong enough to convict, but that’s not my problem. All I have to do is create a reasonable doubt that Zack Bowen killed Chris. The evidence of Joey’s involvement is strong enough for that purpose.”
Kimball regarded me with something like amusement and said, “So you think you can get your client acquitted by resorting to the character assassination of a twenty-year-old boy who’s just lost his father? That won’t get you very far.”
“Joey was seen entering the courthouse garage on the night Chris was murdered,” I said, bluffing.
“Seen by whom?” The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he realized his mistake and said, with suave certainty, “He couldn’t have been seen by anyone, because he wasn’t there.”
“My witness will testify to it,” I replied.
I could see him considering his possible responses, searching for the least incriminating one.
“Your witness is mistaken,” he said, with the same smooth tone.
“Joey will have to get on the stand and say so,” I replied. “And then it won’t be my investigator questioning him, it’ll be me.”
He changed gears and said, “If you’re so sure it was my grandson who killed Chandler, why haven’t you gone to the police with your evidence?”
“I told you,” I replied, “that’s not my job.”
“But it is your job to exonerate your client,” he said, “and if you can do that by revealing the real culprit, why not go to the authorities?”
“Is that really what you want me to do?”
“What else did you have in mind?”
“With the proper groundwork, Joey could get off fairly lightly if he came forward on his own.”
“What do you mean, with the proper groundwork?”
“Chris’s murder was a crime of passion,” I replied. “A good lawyer and a persuasive psychiatrist could get Joey off with manslaughter and he’d be out in three years. Maybe it needn’t even go that far if the D.A. was willing to cut a deal.”
He listened intently, but when I finished, he said, “Tell me about this suppression motion. What are you after there?”
Without going into specifics, I explained that I had pretty good evidence to impeach McBeth’s claim in her affidavit that she’d been directed to Zack’s apartment by an anonymous tip.
“And who’s the judge that’s going to hear this?” Kimball asked.
“Torres-Jones,” I said.
“I don’t think I know him,” he said.
“Her,” I replied.
“Her,” he repeated. “And if you suppress this evidence, the case against your client falls apart.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Well, maybe you’ll get lucky at your hearing,” he said, dismissively. “You’ll have to excuse me, now. I have another appointment.”
I got up and said, “Thank you for your time.”
“Good luck,” he smiled.
I stood for a moment in the hall outside of his office, just long enough to hear him pick up his phone and say, “Hi, it’s grandad. Is your mother home?”
I would’ve stood there longer, but the woman in the yellow sweater appeared in the corridor and I made my exit.
I didn’t know exactly what to make of my conversation with Joe Kimball but one thing was clear, Joey didn’t have an alibi for the night of Chris’s murder. If he had, Kimball would have laid it out and shown me to the door. Instead, what I got from him was an ambivalent mixture of indignation and calculation, as if he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to intimidate me or cut a deal. I could see his dilemma. Legally, there was nothing he could do to prevent me from implicating Joey in Chris’s murder because Joey wasn’t a party to the case. Therefore, if I had evidence against Joey, he couldn’t prevent its admission or challenge its veracity in court. His only possible solution was to persuade me not to use the evidence. He hadn’t succeeded in scaring me off, but I was pretty sure I’d be hearing from him or Bay again.
21
THE BAILIFF, A SKINNY, red-headed boy, on hearing the buzzer that indicated the judge was about to enter the court, said, “Please rise, Division Twenty-four of the Municipal Court of Los Angeles is now in session, Judge Torres-Jones presiding.”
I nudged Zack and we got to our feet. Torres-Jones was taller than I thought she’d be, but otherwise as benign in the flesh as she was in her photograph and she wore her authority with an easy self-confidence.
“Good morning,” she said. “Please be seated.”
I glanced back to the rows of benches behind the railing where witnesses and spectators sat, to see if the last of my witnesses, Karen Holman, had appeared yet. Don Ward was whispering something to his wife, Donna, who nodded agreement. Ben Harper sat apart, his arms crossed, trying to look unimpressed. Darlene Sawyer smiled at me from the back of the room. There were maybe a dozen other people in the room, some from the press, the others, prosecution witnesses for the prelim. No Karen Holman
.
I was sitting at counsel table with Zack, who was wearing a coat and tie for the occasion. At the other end of the table, the D.A., an intense, curly-haired woman named Laura Lang, conferred with Yolanda McBeth, both of them in dark suits. McBeth glanced over at me, then quickly looked away.
The judge was saying, “People versus Bowen. The defendant is present in court. Will the parties state their appearances for the record.”
“Henry Rios for the defendant,” I said.
“Laura Lang for the People.”
“Thank you,” the judge said. “We’re here this morning for the preliminary hearing and also for a fifteen-thirty-eight-point-five motion. Shall we take the motion first?”
“That would be the defense’s preference, Your Honor,” I said.
She looked at Lang, “People?”
“That’s fine,” she said.
“All right, let’s proceed. Mr. Rios, it’s your motion. Proceed.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” I said, getting to my feet. “Unlike most suppression hearings, there is a search warrant in this case. We are seeking to have the warrant quashed on the grounds that the supporting affidavit contains either deliberate falsehoods or was made with a reckless disregard for the truth. We want to suppress all evidence gathered as a result of the search, particularly the object identified by the warrant as the potential murder weapon and articles of clothing, all of them taken from my client’s apartment.”
The court reporter tapped away, recording my boilerplate.
“What exactly is the object you’re talking about?” the judge asked.
“It’s a marble obelisk,” I said, “about a foot tall.”
She jotted a note. “And the clothes?”
“Pants and a shirt,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “Now what are the statements you allege are false, Mr. Rios?”
“Your Honor,” I said, “the warrant was issued on the basis of an anonymous telephone call supposedly made by a tenant of the building where my client lived and received by the affiant, Detective McBeth. We intend to prove there was no such call, that, in fact, the description given by the putative caller of what he saw from where he saw it is physically impossible.”
