by Tonya Plank
“What did you say?”
“I said no, of course,” he said laughing.
“And it’s okay?”
“The studio doesn’t own me, Rory.” He looked away. I could tell his pride was hurt.
“I know, of course they don’t. But they didn’t fire you, right? I mean, she was wrong about that?”
He shook his head, his eyes still focused on something in the distance. “They didn’t say anything about that.”
“But was it implied?” I began rising. “I mean, why aren’t you there right now?”
“No, no, calm down,” he whispered, returning his gaze to me.
“You don’t want to have to leave the U.S. right before—”
“Shhh. Please sit back down.” He placed both hands on my shoulders and massaged, working his fingers gently down my arms to the bubbly water. “It’s okay, Rory. They know my worth. I’m not there tonight because I told them I didn’t want to fill the spaces left vacant by the three women for now. Not until Blackpool is over. That will give us extra time to prepare, which we are going to need now.” He stroked my knee.
I looked deeply into his eyes. His gaze projected confidence but I knew there had to be worry behind it. I knew he’d considered the what-ifs. I knew he could easily get another studio to hire him. Or with his star status he could probably even qualify for an artist visa. But I also knew from my immigration law classes that he’d have to return to Russia and go through the application all over again, which was a bureaucratic pain that could take months. I knew he knew that from living it. I didn’t need to tell him.
He smiled. His big blues lit up and the charmingly boyish dimples I so loved appeared around the curve of his mouth. “I can see your brain working. My little lawyer,” he said kissing my head. “My smart, very, very smart, beautiful lawyer girlfriend.”
His words made me tingle all over. He was fully clothed but I wanted to pull him into the tub with me.
“Yes, in the event I decide to leave the studio…if, for example, they won’t let up on demanding I get her back, there are other possibilities,” he said, reading my thoughts yet again. “But really, Rory, it won’t come to that. It just won’t. They’re not going to lose me over a student. Students come and go too quickly in this line of work.”
We could get married as a backup, I thought but didn’t say. But then I realized how good he was at reading my thoughts, and I accidentally gulped, breathing in some of the bubbles that had inched up my neck, resulting in a minor coughing frenzy.
“Are you okay?” he said, gently patting my back. There was laughter in his voice. He knew what I’d thought.
I looked away, totally embarrassed. “Mmm hmm,” I managed.
He nuzzled his nose into my hair. “That’s also a possibility. A very serious possibility,” he whispered, kissing the nape of my neck.
***
Gunther finally asked me to return to work on Jamar’s case. I was elated.
“Okay, give me what you got,” he said after calling me into his office.
I’d already given him my memo outlining the case file and my list of questions for the police regarding the interrogation, which I’d made over a month ago now. But somehow I knew he wouldn’t have them. So, luckily, I’d made copies, which I handed to him.
“Okay, tell me what all this is, Rory. I don’t really have time to read it all,” he said, flipping through the stack of pages.
I’d also remembered him reading through it and asking me questions about it earlier but I didn’t say anything. I figured it wouldn’t help. I just went through it all again.
“So, the evidence is—his co-defendants and a disinterested witness say he cased the place for weeks,” Gunther said, summing up. “The co-defendants’ statements to police—that he masterminded the whole thing and that he stood lookout—were identical. A disinterested eyewitness saw him on the street right before the murders. He ran from police when they tried to stop him right after the murders. And then he confessed to organizing it all, and his confession is corroborated by that of his co-defendants.”
I took a deep breath. Sometimes I wondered if Gunther was playing the devil’s advocate to test my debating skills. “I know it doesn’t look good. But maybe his friends planned the whole thing and knew he’d be a perfect scapegoat because he’s mentally challenged and wouldn’t be able to fight back. He lives down the street from the place where the murders occurred, so that explains why people saw—”
“Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, why don’t we get to that, to why you think he’s retarded?”
“Well, first it was just a sense I had from watching all the videotaped statements. The co-defendants are so much older and they seemed so much more in control of the conversation with the D.A. Jamar kept frowning and he spoke really slowly and it really didn’t look like he understood any—”
“So that’s it? A feeling?” Gunther asked, making a waving motion with his arm.
That’s what he’d said to me when we went over this before, I now remembered. “And when I talked to him in person, I saw it firsthand. And then he got a headache, which he said he had the night he was arrested, and he couldn’t even finish the conversation with me because it hurt—”
“Okay, so he has a headache and you think he’s retarded?”
“It was a debilitating headache. Plus, he signed the Miranda warning with an ‘X,’ instead of his name. And he had no criminal record, whereas the other boys had long records and—”
I was talking as fast as I possibly could so Gunther wouldn’t cut me off again before I finished.
“And the police lied?” he asked.
“What?” I was confused by his rapid change of subject. But I tried to be quick and adjust. “No, I don’t think they lied. I just think they didn’t realize he’d be susceptible to suggestion and didn’t understand his Miranda warnings.”
“So the police fed him his confession and manipulated him?”
Ugh, weren’t we on the same side? “Fed is a strong word. They didn’t know they manipulated him because maybe they didn’t know he was mentally challenged. He doesn’t have Downs or anything obvious.”
“And why do you think he was manipulated?”
“The co-defendants were being interrogated at the same time. The police could have suggested to Jamar the story the others were giving them. The police seemed to tell Jamar he’d be near his brother if imprisoned. But I don’t know how they were going to do that. His brother’s in a high-security prison in another county. I think he basically told the police what they wanted to hear so they’d put him near his brother, which they couldn’t do.”
Gunther rolled his eyes.
“I don’t know everything. I have to go back and interview him again—”
“How many times did you talk to him?”
“Only once. You told me—”
“Once? Only once?” He was mad. He shook his head in disbelief.
“You told me to stop working on the case. You told me to work on other—”
“Have you talked to anyone else? His mother, his brother?”
“I’ve tried but haven’t been able to—”
“Rory!” Gunther threw his hands up. “You need to take your own initiative here! You’ve accomplished very, very little on this case.”
“But I thought you’d taken me off the case. Every day you told me to ask other—” I was completely aghast. I’d really wanted to work on this case. It was the only case here that made me passionate about practicing law at all and I’d felt so sympathetic for Jamar ever since I saw him on that video. Gunther had specifically told me to work on other things until he said otherwise. I couldn’t believe he’d forgotten that, or was denying it.
“Please, no excuses,” he said, giving me the palm.
My mouth remained open, but I had nothing to say.
“Okay, talk to him again when he’s not having a ‘headache,’” Gunther said, placing air quotes around the last word. “And get all of his
medical records.” He promptly returned his attention to paperwork strewn about his desk. “You can go,” he said, still looking down.
***
Despite Gunther’s anger, I was thrilled. I worked on Jamar’s case for most of the next two weeks. First I called Jamar’s mother again, and nearly fell out of my chair when she actually answered this time. “Ms. Jackson?”
“Who’s asking?” she responded, her voice laced with both fear and anger.
“I’m a lawyer, Aurora Laudner. I represent your son in his court case.” I hoped to put her at ease.
She began breathing heavily, and in a strained way, it seemed. I could tell she was a smoker.
“Darnell? Darnell! You gonna appeal again? You gonna get him out?” she asked, growing excited.
“No, no, not Darnell. Mrs. Jackson. Your other son, Jamar.”
Silence for several seconds. Then a groan. “What do you want?” she said after a deep, belabored breath.
I was taken aback by her complete apathy toward one of her sons. “Well, Jamar will soon be on trial for being an accomplice to a double homicide. I’m sure you know that.” I waited to see if any of my words rang a bell. She seemed more than a little out of it.
“So?” was all she had to say.
“Well…” I was going to ask her an open-ended question like whether she had any thoughts on the case, so that I wouldn’t suggest any particular responses. But that didn’t seem like a good idea here. She wasn’t going to be offering me any information I didn’t ask for. “I wondered if he’s the type of person who might falsely confess to doing something because the police were able to take advantage of him? Or the type of person who might easily be led into doing something by older boys. When I talked to him and watched his confession tapes, Mrs. Jackson, well, he just seemed a little…slow.” I hoped I didn’t offend her.
Instead she burst out laughing. “That boy is so damn dumb,” she barked.
Wow, I’d never heard a mother talk about her child like that. I had to work to keep my composure. “You mean he’s mentally handicapped in some way, Mrs. Jackson?”
She guffawed again. “I guess you can put it that way.”
“Well, how would you put it? Please, Mrs. Jackson, it’s very important that I understand him in order to represent him to the best of my abilities.”
She took another belabored breath, which was followed by shorter, staccato’d breaths.
“Mrs. Jackson, are you okay?” I asked, now realizing she was crying.
“My son, he was just standing up for him when he shot that boy. And now he’s gone forever. No parole.”
I was confused, then realized by “my son,” she meant Darnell.
“What happened with Darnell?”
“Darnell, oh Darnell,” she cried.
And I let her.
“Darnell,” she continued after a couple minutes. “This horrible kid from down the street was always making fun of Jamar. One day he was calling him retard and Darnell told him to stop it. He was making faces like he was having a seizure, like Jamar got sometimes. And Darnell kept telling him to quit it. Quit it.” She was now yelling. “But the stupid kid wouldn’t. Then he started calling Darnell the retard’s brother, and, awwwww,” she howled.
“Mrs. Jackson?” I said. “Mrs. Jackson, please continue. What happened then?”
“Then, Darnell took out a gun and shot that boy. He shot him over and over and over again. Just protecting his brother. And now he’s gone. And I can’t even see him. They won’t let me see him no more.”
“Mrs. Jackson, maybe I can do something about that. Try to get you visitation rights. You should be able to see your own son.”
I had no idea what I was saying; Darnell’s case was totally out of my jurisdiction. But she really should be able to see him.
“For now, I just want to ask you a little bit more about Jamar,” I continued. “Did he ever see a doctor for these seizures? Was he ever officially pronounced epileptic or mentally retarded by a professional?”
“Nah. They said he’d grow out of them. The child doctor. We never had any tests done. They said he would be okay.”
“So it was like childhood epilepsy?” She didn’t answer, so I continued. “And his IQ was never tested? Right?”
“Naaa, naa,” she said with a slight laugh. “None of us go to doctors too often.”
“Well, do you have the name of that pediatrician, or the place he went when he was little where they said he’d grow out of it?”
Long silence.
“Mrs. Jackson.”
“Yeah, I’m thinking,” she barked.
“Okay, sorry. I didn’t mean to rush you. Thank you.”
“It was just the county. The county children’s hospital. I don’t remember no more.”
“Thank you so much, Mrs. Jackson. You’ve been a tremendous help. Is there any way you could come into court and testify to all this to help your son?” I ventured.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don’t want nothing to do with no courthouse!” she yelled.
“Okay, Mrs. Jackson. Sorry to upset you. I will try to do something about you being able to see Darnell, okay?”
She’d already hung up. Wow, she really blamed Jamar for getting her favorite son locked up. How tremendously sad. I knew we could get a subpoena to compel her to testify. I didn’t know what kind of witness she’d be, though.
I tried to put in a call to Darnell again. They said he was still in lockup. Maybe he’d been there for a long time and that’s why Mrs. Jackson couldn’t see him. I made a note to check up on it. Then I called the Los Angeles County Children’s Services to initiate a search for Jamar’s records, hoping they still existed. I learned later in the week that they didn’t, unfortunately, and that the state had no other records of him.
I went to see Jamar a total of four times during the following week and a half. I noticed the entire time he talked to me, he looked down at the floor, not at me, and rocked himself back and forth in his chair. At first, I asked him if he had a headache and he said no, he hadn’t had one in a few weeks.
“How often do you get them?” I asked.
“Comes and goes. Sometimes one a week; sometimes I can go for months without.”
“And what happens when you get them?”
He shrugged. “I shake a lot, and I just can’t think too much over the hurt. And sometimes I don’t remember stuff.”
“You don’t remember stuff? So it’s like epilepsy?”
He shrugged again. “Don’t know, ma’am. Don’t know that word.”
“Did you have one the night of the crime?”
He looked pensive for a moment. “Yes.” He nodded rapidly.
“Okay, when?”
“When?” He looked confused.
“On the street? In the police precinct?”
“Oh, in the police station.”
We spent a lot of time going through the events of that evening again, slowly and carefully. A different story emerged than what was on the videotapes. He was walking home from McDonald’s, a block from the store where the murders happened. He went to that McDonald’s daily. His mom had been depressed and bedridden ever since Darnell’s conviction, so he was responsible for getting her food. On his way home that night, he unexpectedly ran into Roberto, Darnell’s old friend. Roberto, who was acting “kinda nervous-like,” was with a kid Jamar didn’t much like, who had a wicked laugh and always seemed like he was up to no good. They told Jamar they wanted to take him to the strip club they always used to go to with Darnell. The guy Roberto was with was very intimidating, and grabbed his McDonald’s bag. Jamar was scared of him and let him have his mother’s food. They talked him into going to the strip club with them. Darnell would never let him go because it was too dangerous. Roberto’s friend told Jamar he was man enough now to act without his big brother’s approval.
But before they went into the club, they needed to do something. They just needed to go into a store and wanted him to wait out
side. If he saw anyone coming, he was to tip his baseball cap toward the corner, in the direction of another boy whom he didn’t know. They promised him it wouldn’t take very long.
Roberto’s friend told him the friend of Fast, the man Darnell killed, would be around, so it was very important he keep watch carefully. This scared Jamar. He tried to focus on the strip club and waited patiently, being scared at times of his own shadow. He saw a car drive by and tipped his hat to the man across the street. But when he looked more closely, he realized it was only a police car. The men in the car looked at him, but kept driving.
A few minutes later, Roberto and his friend ran out of the store and fled past him. Roberto grabbed him and told him to come with them; they had to “git fast.” Jamar tried to keep up but he was too overweight and eventually lost them. They left him all alone. He began to get really scared of Fast’s friends.
Soon, a car approached him and he ran as fast as he could, fearing it was Fast. But the man from the car caught up with him. He was a police officer. He held Jamar by his shoulder and told him to wait on the street with him. Another car drove by and the officer shined a light on Jamar before pushing him into the back seat of the car and taking him to the police station.
I knew he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. I felt it in my gut. I believed him.
We also talked at length about his interrogation. In the precinct the police kept telling him to tell the truth and cooperate because judges and District Attorneys really liked cooperative people and would be more inclined to be lenient in sentencing. He signed the Miranda rights he was read with an “X” since he didn’t know how to write his name. He didn’t really understand them but signed because he was afraid of the “mean officer who kept stomping his hard boots” and he wanted to please the “nice cop with the red hair and the fat smile.” They handcuffed him to a pole, and, because the chair was too far away, he had to sit on the cold floor with one arm raised above him at an awkward angle, causing him a lot of shoulder pain, which eventually led to the head pain. He never ate anything in the precinct, but remembered drinking a glass of water. He didn’t remember even being escorted to the bathroom.