Presumption of Guilt

by Rachel Sinclair

  “Tomorrow I quit,” she said, and I could tell that she was taking a drag even as she said those words.

  “It is tomorrow,” I said, looking at the clock again. 4:17.

  “Shut up,” she said, and I could imagine her deep green eyes rolling in exasperation.

  “So, what are you doing up at this hour?” I asked her.

  “Talking to you, or did you forget that you called me?”

  It was my turn to roll my eyes. “I mean, I could tell that you were already awake when I called.”

  “How could you tell that?”

  “You didn’t sound like you were asleep.”

  “What does a person sound like on the phone when they’re asleep? I mean, do sleeping people talk on the phone these days? I wasn’t aware of that.”

  I sighed. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I was just giving you shit. I was dying my hair when you called, actually. You’re going to love it. Bright blue streaks. It’s really kinda lit AF if you want to know the truth about it.”

  I imagined her jet black hair with bright blue streaks and realized that if anybody was going to pull it off, it would be Regina. The woman was gorgeous, plain and simple. In prison, of course, she didn’t wear makeup, but she didn’t need to. Her skin was flawless and olive. Her hair was thick and dark, her eyes bright green, her cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass. Her body was curvy, but, in her case, “curvy” was not a euphemism for “fat,” as so many women used the term. One of her arms was basically a tattoo sleeve, which didn’t put off most men and plenty of women, because it just made her seem hotter. Indeed, she was the woman that most straight women pegged as their “one lesbian fantasy girl,” the one woman they would screw if given permission by their conservative husbands.

  “I’d imagine your hair is. Lit, I mean,” I said.

  “Not just lit, but lit AF. Get it right.” I could hear the laughter in her voice, so I didn’t take offense to her words. “Anyhow, you called me for a reason, so out with it.”

  I drew a breath and shook my head, realizing that I really didn’t know exactly why I had called her. “I don’t really know. I guess I needed to hear a friendly voice. I knew that you probably would be awake, as you’re the only person I know who would possibly be up at this hour.”

  “I’m a vampire, what can I say,” she said, and then coughed again.

  “That shit will kill you, you know.”

  “So will your bottle of Jack, but you don’t hear me nagging at you about it. Besides, I got the patch. I just haven’t put it on yet. Maybe if I take a long plane trip somewhere I’ll wear that patch, because I’ve talked to guys who’ve had a nicotine fit on the way to Singapore, and, trust me, that shit ain’t pretty. But I don’t plan on flying to Singapore anytime soon, so guess you’re not going to get your wish.”

  I pet Lola’s head as she groaned in her sleep. Lola apparently had as many nightmares as I did, as she was always whining, groaning and twitching as she slumbered next to her sister and me in our enormous bed. I specifically got the California King because I wanted my two girls sleeping next to me. Since they were both Boxer dogs, and not exactly small, the bed had to be pretty huge for all of us to sleep in it comfortably.

  I looked at the ocean and I noticed that it was finally starting to get light out. The sand was starting to get a pinkish tinge to it, and I could smell the strong scent of the strings of seaweed that washed up on the beach. “Well, I called you in the middle of the night, so I guess I need to say something profound to make it worth your while,” I said.

  “Yeah, don’t worry about that,” she said. “If you had something real to say, you probably would have already said it. You just wanted to shoot the breeze with me because that’s what you’re used to.”

  That was true enough. My chronic insomnia began when I was in prison. It was hard to sleep when there were people all over screaming and crying, and the temperature was near freezing or sometimes just too hot. It was also hard to sleep when you were obsessed about whether or not you would ever have freedom, and about exactly what it was that went so terribly wrong. Regina didn’t sleep much, either, so she and I would end up talking long into the night.

  Now that I had my freedom, and was living in paradise, I still couldn’t sleep. My therapist would tell me that my problem was that I had buried rage about what had happened to me, and, until I acknowledged that and dealt with it, I was going to continue to not be able to sleep. Not to mention the fact that I also had an issue with chronic migraine headaches. Again, my therapist told me that the headaches were another outward manifestation of my fury about the prosecutor in my case hiding DNA evidence that exonerated me completely. They also hid the evidence that my friend was raped before she was murdered, so, obviously, I would have been found not guilty if these facts would have been made known.

  The case was still not settled, either. I had my suspicions on exactly why the case wasn’t settled, and why the cops never did look for the person who killed Becky. I had my strong suspicions on that, but nothing that I could ever prove.

  I took a deep breath. “You still there?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, still here. Admiring my handiwork. I think you’re gonna love it.”

  I looked around, saw that it was now 5:01, and realized that Aidan was probably going to be getting up soon enough. He had an early morning gig at Starbucks, and I knew that I was probably going to have to rouse him out of bed so that he didn’t lose his job.

  My brother might have looked like a typical surfer slacker – he had the requisite longish hair, light brown with gold highlights from the sun, not to mention the fact that he was usually quite tan and always very fit – but he definitely had the mentality of somebody who was on the move. Like myself, he always blew the roof off of any IQ test, and he was always at the ready with facts and figures on just about anything. He always got straight As, all through college and now law school, even though he didn’t study nearly as much as other straight A students did.

  But he did tend to burn the candle at both ends. Case in point was last night, as he had several of his buddies over to smoke some weed, drink some beer, build a fire in my fire pit, and just watch the waves crashing on the shore. They were awake until 2 AM, which was actually comforting for me, because there was nothing worse than tossing and turning for hours on end and knowing that nobody was around to hear you.

  “Listen, I gotta go,” I told Regina. “I think my brother needs to be roused out of bed so that he’s not late for work.”

  “You’re not your brother’s baby-sitter,” Regina scolded me. “He’s a grown-ass man, he can get his own butt out of bed.”

  “Yeah, I know, but-“

  “Whatever. Listen, I’ll be seeing you later on today. Word on the street is that you’re going to be getting a doozy of a case. Your ass is going to be right in the fire if you take this one.”

  I didn’t quite know what she meant. I did take many of my cases pro bono if I truly believed in the person. That was the advantage of my large settlement – I had enough money to tide me over for the rest of my life. I didn’t have to work for money, so I often took cases as passion projects.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll find out what I mean. Trust me, you’re going to get it good and hard with this case, without KY jelly. But only if you decide to take it.”

  I didn’t even want to ask. “Will you please stop being so opaque and just tell me what’s going on and how it is that you know about whatever this is and I don’t?”

  “Dude, I got my sources. If I told you who they are, I would have to kill you, and, well, been there, done that, not doing it again. Later.” At that, she hung up.

  I clicked the phone, patted Lola’s head and saw that Harlow had finally decided to join us on the balcony. I didn’t have time to think about what Regina was just implying about some juicy case I was going to have dumped on my lap.

  I padded down the hallway to Aidan’s room and heard
his snoring. “Aidan,” I said, nudging him. “Don’t you have to be at your job in about an hour?” He usually worked the 6 AM-9AM shift, which worked in well with his school schedule.

  He opened one eye and squinted. “Who let the hamster sleep in my mouth?” he asked me, as he opened and closed his mouth and stuck out his tongue. “Water. I need water.” At that, he got up and headed out the door of his bedroom and padded to the kitchen. He stuck his entire head into the sink and put the hose nozzle directly into his mouth. Then he put that same nozzle over his head, soaking his brown hair. “Much better,” he said.

  I tried my hardest not to give my usual big sister lecture about how hard it is on a person’s body to drink and smoke pot all night, then get up just a few hours later for work, then go to school and try to stay awake during lecture and try to answer questions about this case or that. Like all law schools, USD used the “Socratic Method,” in which every student could be conceivably put in the hot seat about the reading assignment for the day. Granted, since Aidan was a third year, this method was much less intense than it was in the first year when the teachers were consciously trying to thin the herd, but I knew that he still had to know his reading assignments for class.

  “Well, you better get into the shower quick and get your ass on that bike.” Aidan had both a motorcycle, which he drove to his school, and a bicycle, which he rode to work. Since the Starbucks where he worked was only 2 miles from our condo, he usually was able to get out the door with only 10 minutes to spare and still make it on time to make his fancy lattes.

  He saluted me, smiled and ran down the hall. I soon heard the shower going.

  I fed the dogs, showered in my own bathroom, got dressed and packed three hard-boiled eggs, a handful of walnuts and a small almond milk into a small bag and got the dogs ready to go to their day care. Doozy Dog Club, the place where I took my pups every day, was downtown on 14th Street. It was on my way to my office, which was in a high-rise office building down by the Embarcadero. My office had a balcony, hardwood floors, and super high ceilings, which was what I was looking for. High ceilings was what I always looked for in any space where I had to spend my time, because high ceilings always gave me the illusion of a lot of room.

  That was another thing that I picked up from my time in prison – severe claustrophobia. I couldn’t feel that I was at all enclosed, and I always had to feel like I had some kind of escape hatch. That was why I also chose places that had lots of balconies. I knew that it wasn’t rational, because the balcony wasn’t an escape hatch for an office that was on the 20th floor of a high-rise, but I knew that my brain wasn’t thinking rationally about it. I only knew that balconies gave me a sense of comfort, so it was important that my condo and office both had plenty of them.

  I got the harnesses on my dogs, and they eagerly leaped into my Tesla SUV, which was parked in the underground parking lot beneath my condo. I could hear them whining and panting in the back as I drove the 10 miles in god-awful traffic to my office.

  Once I dropped off the dogs and got to my office, I realized what Regina was talking about.

  On my desk was a large manila envelope which looked like it contained a file. On it was a note from Steve Rattner, a good friend of mine who was in the trenches doing criminal defense. “Have a look at this case if you don’t mind. I ran into this client’s cellmate when I was in jail, and she’s looking for counsel. She doesn’t have a dime to her name and she doesn’t want to take her chances with appointed counsel. She’s facing the death penalty, so I don’t blame her. I immediately thought of you because you’re the only person I know who would take a case like this without pay. I hope that you can take her on. Thank you.”

  I tore open the envelope, and I immediately saw what Regina was apparently talking about when she was saying that my ass was going to be in the fire with this new case.

  There was a case that had absolutely blown up in the media. A wealthy family who lived in one of those $15 million mansions on Coronado had recently reported their daughter, Aria, missing. It turned out that Aria was actually not exactly missing, but she was dead – she was found in the guest house, having been strangled with a hemp rope. The live-in maid, Esme, short for Esmeralda, was charged with her murder. Esme apparently owned a hemp rope, and she lived in the guest house. Aria’s jewelry was found in this guest house, so the theory was that Esme stole this jewelry, and then, when Aria went to confront her about it, Esme murdered Aria. I gasped when I got another part of the file that described exactly what jewelry Esme apparently took from Aria – a $10 million necklace made with an extremely rare pink diamond.

  All that was bad enough. The details were sordid enough that the case would be compelling in its own right. That wasn’t what really got the media salivating about this one, though.

  No, it was made all the worse because Esme was a refugee. She had temporary protected status from our government, awarded to her during the Obama administration, back when refugees were actually welcomed into this country in much larger numbers than they presently were. She came to this country in 2013, fleeing her home country of El Salvador after her entire family was murdered by the drug cartels down there. She got word on the streets of her neighborhood that she was going to be next, so she made the long trek to the United States by hanging on to the top of a freight train along with thousands of other desperate people, then walking for thousands of miles on foot. I read her story, as the New York Times had written an in-depth article on her plight after she was arrested. My heart went out to her as I read about how she didn’t eat anything for several days, then, when she went through a farmer’s field on her way up through Mexico, she got caught stealing some corn. Her punishment for this was that she was forced to stay with the farmer for several days, doing sexual services for him and all of his friends. The farmer thought that this was a just payment for what she had done, stealing his corn, and Esme, being desperate, didn’t protest this.

  That was just one of the horrible things that Esme went through to get to this country. The article detailed other atrocities, things that would cause anybody to have severe PTSD or just become numb. Her companion fell off the top of the train that she and others were clinging onto as it barreled down the tracks at 80 miles per hour. Esme watched in horror as her companion, Maria, was decapitated on the tracks. Her limbs were scattered throughout the Mexican countryside, and nobody on the train even batted an eyelash about this. They had seen it all before. This kind of thing was a daily occurrence. Likewise, when Esme was basically abducted by the farmer and made a sex slave for several days, there wasn’t a thing that she could do about it. That was just the way it was, and too many people would agree with the farmer – she took food from him, so he was justified in taking from her.

  Esme’s story was compelling and heartbreaking. The New York Times did its level best in humanizing her, but that didn’t matter in certain corners of the media. The right-wing talk show hosts had been banging on Esme’s case ever since she was arrested, and Fox News led off their nightly telecasts with her story. They had attorneys on set to breathlessly discuss the details of poor Aria and how Esme, and common criminals like her, were the reason why the current government was justified in cracking down on the number of refugees that would be allowed into this country. Esme was part of the brown menace. Indeed, she had become the face of it, even though she wasn’t even brown. She was a light-skinned El Salvadoran, blonde and blue-eyed.

  The death penalty had been sought in her case. She needed an attorney. If she couldn’t afford one, she would take her chances with an appointed one.

  I sighed as I realized that I probably was going to end up taking her case.

  What was I getting into?

  Chapter 3

  Esme - August 2013

  Esmerelda Gutierrez came back to her house after working in the field the entire day, picking cabbages to take to the local market for her boss, Guillermo, who paid her $8 a day for 13 hours of back-breaking work. She worked fr
om 5 in the morning to 6:30 in the evening, taking a half hour for a break. It was a hot day, as most days were in the summertime, but Esme still had to work all day long just to make enough money to help her parents take care of their family that included Esme, her four brothers and sisters and her maternal grandparents who still lived with her and her family in a two-room shack that did not have running water or plumbing.

  That was the only life that she had ever known. She was lucky. She knew that. Her family owned a small tract of land where they raised chickens and grew their own vegetables. Kale, potatoes, corn, beets and rutabaga grew in the rich soil of the small Gutierrez farm, so Esme and her family did not always go hungry. But Esme still had to work the land for Guillermo, because the meager crops did not go far with a family as large as theirs.

  But, at least so far, their family had not had to answer to the Mara Salvatrucha, the drug cartel that ran large parts of the more populated areas of the town where she lived, Santiago Ixcuintepec, which was a small town in the middle of a thick jungle. The townspeople lived in fear of the Mara Salvatrucha, and they really started to fear for their lives when the 18th Street gang came to town and tried to overtake the Mara Salvatrucha. The two rival cartels fought each other for turf, terrorizing shopkeepers and street vendors and just about everybody who lived and worked in the small town where she lived. But she and her family were rural dwellers, and the gangs had not yet come to where she lived.

  She got to her house. Her mother had apparently done laundry, as everybody’s clothes and underwear were hanging outside, blowing in the breeze. The 10 chickens that the family kept, as their eggs were valuable both for feeding the family and for taking to market, were pecking around the grass, caw-cawing as their necks bobbed and their heads shook. They scratched the ground, looking for bugs to eat, and Esme always got a laugh out of seeing the way that they strutted around. Some of the chickens were missing the feathers on their heads and necks, because the other chickens pecked them because they were low on the pecking order. But they never seemed to mind the injustice.