Presumption of Guilt

by Rachel Sinclair

  “No, of course I don’t just take clients who I think are innocent. It’s just that it’s a personal policy of mine that I won’t actually try a case with a guilty client. At least not one that I know for sure is guilty. So, if I think that this Esme woman did it, I either won’t take her as a client or I’ll be up front that I’ll be trying to get a decent plea agreement. That’s all.”

  I heard Regina snort on the phone. “A lawyer with principles. What is the world coming to? Anyhow, what time you going to go and see her? I’d like to come with you and take notes. I guess I’ll be doing the investigation for you.”

  “Of course. Goes without saying.” Regina liked me because she knew that I had deep pockets and that I always paid on time. Besides, I was the one who got her started in her private eye practice. When I got out of prison and was awarded my money from the state of Missouri for false imprisonment, then went to college and law school, I started my practice out here and, when she called me to tell me that she, too, was released from prison, I immediately hired her to do my investigations. I knew that she was going to have an issue with finding decent employment. After all, her previous jobs consisted of being a stripper and a prostitute. Plus, she was a felon, even without her overturned murder charge. When she was 18, she had been down both for felony drug charges and for possessing a weapon while out on parole.

  Regina was only 33, the same age as me, yet it seemed that she had lived several lifetimes. None of those lifetimes were happy ones, so I decided that I was going to do what I could to make her life as happy as it could be. I never regretted giving her a chance to do PI work, because it turned out she had a real knack for it. She was smart as a whip, spoke the language of the street, and was extremely thorough.

  “Well, then, I better go down and see her, too, don’tcha think?” Regina asked. “You aren’t the only one who needs to get a feel for this chick and hear her story. See how her face is when she talks about what happened. Look at her body language. Besides, I’m like a built-in lie detector machine. Nobody gets past my bullshit-meter.”

  I looked at the clock and then looked at my schedule for that day. It was packed with hearings and client intake interviews, and it looked like the only time that I was going to be able to fit Esme into my schedule was 6 PM. “Hate to tell you, Regina, but today’s schedule is packed tighter than a Jetblue puddle-jumper. I have to make it this evening at 6.”

  “Cool. You know I don’t have nothing going on at night these days. I’ll buy you dinner afterwards, how about that? What’s a good place downtown by the jail?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The Old Spaghetti Factory. But you don’t have to buy me dinner.”

  “I know I don’t, but that’s not the point. I want to pick your brain after we meet this chick, and I know I don’t want to go to your hoity-toity condo to do it. Why do you like living around there with all those richie-riches, anyhow?”

  Coronado was known for its wealth, that was for sure. I remembered coming to town and seeing that a 600 square foot home that was built in the 1940s, or maybe even before, was selling for $1.2 million. It was then that I understood that the real value in the houses on Coronado wasn’t in the homes themselves, but the land that the houses sat upon.

  My condo was worth some $1.5 million, even though it was only a two bedroom. I wanted it, though, because it was close by the water. Other beaches around town didn’t have condos right on the ocean. Mission Beach had enormous homes by the ocean. Ocean Beach didn’t have condos or homes right on the ocean, and neither did Pacific Beach. La Jolla had some, but not as nice as the one that I chose in Coronado.

  “I just needed to be by the water,” I said. “That’s really all.” Sometimes I regretted living there, because my condo abutted a very public beach, one that got really crowded, starting in the summertime, and people tended to get really loud when I was trying to sleep. But mostly, it was comforting to live in such close proximity to the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

  “Okay. Well, listen, chica, I gotta go. I’ve got to shake down a couple of goombahs in Imperial Beach for somebody. I’ll be meeting you at 6 at the jail, huh?”

  “Right. Six at the jail.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Chapter 5

  Regina

  Regina drove along after she talked to Avery. She loved that girl so much, platonically, of course, but she could never admit to it. That was the one thing that she learned from her mother – people were shit. The sooner you knew that, the better off you would be, because you would never be disappointed in life if you just knew going in that everybody you ever cared about was going to leave you sooner or later.

  Her father, what she could remember about him, wasn’t like her mother. He was kind, giving, loving. Nobody could understand what it was that he saw in her mother. Her mom liked to go out without her dad to bars, for hours at a time. Her dad would get a call from the police, telling him to come and get her because she was raising a stink and starting fights and she was always about to be hauled off to jail. He would always go to the bar and be able to talk her into coming home, even though she usually punched him a time or two in the process.

  If a man treated a woman, in public, the way her mother treated her father, that man would have gone to jail, no questions asked. But her mother always got away with beating on her father, and everybody would either make a joke about it or just say “well, that’s Anita being Anita.”

  Then, when her father was shot while he changed a tire by a man who, it turned out, was on drugs and in the middle of a country-wide crime spree, and needed her dad’s car to get away from the law, Regina’s world crumbled around her. She never got close to her mother. She couldn’t. It wasn’t just that her mother had a serious drinking problem and had always run around on her father, all through their marriage, but also that her mother didn’t want to have a thing to do with Regina. After her father died, her mother was unleashed, even more than before, and she never had a kind word for Regina. In fact, it was quite the opposite – she told Regina, as many chances as she got, that she regretted ever giving birth to her. That she was free, finally free, to do what it was that she wanted to do, but she couldn’t because she had Regina to think about.

  Then her mother went ahead and did what she wanted to, anyhow, Regina at home or no. That meant that she could go to the bars and stay there, even when 10-year-old Regina got home from school and needed her mother around to take care of her. Eventually, because her mother didn’t work – she was too busy getting drunk and sleeping with every man in town – the family lost their home. Her father didn’t have life insurance, so there wasn’t money, aside from the small social security check that Regina got from the government that was spent by her mother on booze.

  After the family lost their home, and the two of them literally lived on the streets, although, from time to time, her mom would find a man to put the two of them up for a night or two, Regina finally decided that she was getting fed up. She never knew where she was going to end up living, and, usually, the places where they stayed weren’t in her school district, so she had to drop out of school, and she was getting tired of moving from place to place and then from shelter to shelter.

  When one of her mother’s men raped her one night, after her mother was passed out drunk on the couch, Regina knew that it was time to split. She took up with Michael, a guy that she met on the bus one day, and never looked back. Michael got her a job in a strip club, even though she was only 13. She looked 21, according to Michael, so he made her an ID saying that was her age. Then it was prostitution, with Michael as her pimp. Michael beat on her pretty much on the regular, but he provided a roof over her head and food on the table and occasionally even let her keep some of her own earnings, although that was a rare occurrence. Michael took care of her, and that’s all she knew.

  She wasn’t quite sure why she snapped, but snapped she did, when she turned 20. She had already gone to prison for a felony drug charge, although she was 100% taking the
rap for Michael. He was the one who possessed the kilo of coke that was hidden in the floorboards of the house where they lived. He told the cops that he didn’t know a thing about it, and pinned it all on her. She took that sentence standing up. To her, it was a chance to get away from Michael’s beatings, not to mention all the beatings she put up with from her johns. The state of Missouri gave her three hots and a cot, plus a chance to get an education. Nothing wrong with having a relatively safe place to stay, food to eat, a roof over her head and women to hang out with. Since her offense was a non-violent one, she was in a minimum security facility, so there wasn’t the bullshit that happened in the maximum security ones.

  She got out on parole, then was returned to prison because she was caught with a gun when she was pulled over and the cops searched the car that she was driving. Michael was to blame for that one, too, because he was the one who put the gun in the car – it was his car that she was driving. She didn’t really mind going back to prison, though, for the same reason why she never minded prison in the first place.

  When she got out on her firearms charge, that was when she snapped. She had put up with years of Michael’s beatings and emotional abuse. She made some good friends in prison, friends who told her about her worth and her strength and how she didn’t need to take crap from nobody. Yet, she ended up back with Michael after she got out of prison for the second time, because she literally had no skills. She had no way of making a living, so she needed Michael. But, when he came home one night, high on PCP and coke, he beat her worse than ever before. He broke her nose, kicked her in her stomach and back, beat her head on the cement floor over and over again. Broke her arm, too.

  Then he passed out on the couch, apparently because he was spent after beating on her for over an hour. Regina found the gun, ironically it was the same gun that caused her to go back to prison when it was found in the car that she was driving, and she shot him in the head. Then she called 911, told them what she did, and requested an ambulance because she felt like she was bleeding internally. The ambulance was sent, she was bleeding internally and, if she would have gotten to the hospital later than she did, she would have bled out and died. In other words, if she didn’t kill Michael when she did, she would have died, because there was no way he would have let her call the ambulance. Whenever he beat her, he didn’t let her call anybody. He knew that if she went to the hospital that she would find people to help her, and that would lead to his downfall.

  She was then up for Michael’s murder. Her attorney never presented evidence about Michael beating her. Never tried to use the battered spouse syndrome defense, which was used in the state of Missouri to show that the person was legally within her rights to use force to protect herself. If her attorney was a better attorney, she would have walked her murder charge down, because she was using self-defense when she shot Michael. But her attorney never argued self-defense or battered spouse syndrome.

  Regina didn’t use a public defender, which was her first mistake. She hired private counsel, all that she could afford, which wasn’t much – she only paid her attorney $1500, her life savings, for the case. She got what she paid for, that was for sure. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  She should have gotten a medal.

  Instead, she got life in prison.

  Then, the Innocence Project attorney came around and helped Avery get out of prison. Avery went to college and law school, all the while trying to secure an Innocence Project attorney for her. Avery finally convinced an Innocence attorney to talk to her, and she told that attorney her story. The Innocence Project attorney did extensive research on her case, won her a new trial, and, in her new trial, she was found not guilty. The jury bought her story that it was her life or Michael’s, even though he was sleeping at the time that she shot him.

  She got out, contacted Avery, who was rich because she won so much money for false imprisonment in her case – in her case, the prosecutor withheld important DNA evidence on Becky, the victim in that case, and they also covered up the fact that Becky had been raped, which meant that Avery obviously didn’t do it – and Avery immediately gave her a job doing investigations. She finally found her calling. Turned out she was amazing at her job. All those years of living on the streets, learning about criminals and what they did, how they thought and what made them tick, finally paid off. She could be a goddamn FBI criminal profiler if she wanted to, because she had the psych shit down when it came to criminals, both common and violent.

  But, of course, she couldn’t be a FBI criminal profiler, just because she was a felon. And, besides, she didn’t have an education. Not a formal education, anyhow. But she could be a private eye, which is what she did – she got her private investigation license after she worked for Avery and some of her lawyer friends for the requisite 2,000 hours. The state of California was hesitant to give her her PI license because of her criminal record, so they held a hearing after she appealed their denial of her license. She won that hearing with Avery’s help, so she was officially a big-shot PI. Her dance card was full, too, because she was good and Avery had lots of lawyer friends, all of whom needed a thorough and intelligent PI who worked for reasonable rates.

  She was itching to get to work on the Esme Gutierrez case. She was excited for it. She just had a gut feeling that Esme was the wronged party. She had no idea, no clue, on who really did Aria, but she just knew in her heart that it wasn’t Esme.

  But, for now, she had crimes to investigate for various attorneys around the city. She was working robberies, burglaries, drug cases, rapes and murders. However, since the media attention was trained so brightly on Esme’s case, her case was going to be Regina’s most important one. She really wasn’t one who sought the klieg lights, but if it was going to shine, she was going to make the most of it.

  Chapter 6

  Avery

  I got to the jail right at 6 PM. I waited for Regina to show up, which she did, about ten minutes late.

  “Sorry, boss,” she said in a tone that was slightly out-of-breath. “I got stuck talking to some gang-bangers over on Market Street. Looks like I’m going to have to go to TJ tomorrow to talk to some dudes. Good thing I got my passport updated, huh?”

  That was the one reason why I hadn’t yet been down to Mexico, although I figured that it was only a matter of time before I was going to have to go down there – I had never bothered to get a passport. You can generally go to Mexico without a passport, but good luck trying to get back out. I almost got stuck going to Mexico when I first moved here – I was trying to find a house, didn’t see the signs on the highway that said that I needed to exit if I didn’t want to leave the country, got into the line of cars leaving the country and had to find a border guard to help me get out of that situation. Good thing, too, because I was pretty green and I wouldn’t have known what to do.

  “Not a prob,” I said. “I see you have your tape recorder. Looks like you’re ready to go.”

  “Oh, God yes,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “Never been more ready for a case in my life.”

  I looked at her hair, which showed some bright blue streaks running through her dark hair. “You were right,” I said, looking at the streaks. “Those highlights really are lit.”

  “Lit AF,” she said, nodding. “Get it right.”

  “Whatever,” I said with a smile. Regina was gorgeous, bright blue streaks or not. “Okay, let’s go and see the guards and go and see our new prospective client, shall we?”

  I showed my bar card to the guard, told her who I was seeing, and she nodded her head and called on the phone. Then she pressed a button, motioning to us, and we went through the door that led to the elevator. Esme was on the fifth floor, although she was apparently being held in protective custody. I found out that it was necessary to put her into protective custody because of her notoriety with this case – apparently, there were threats against her from some of the women who were virulently anti-immigrant. One of the
women managed to bring a knife into the lunch room and slashed Esme’s arm and threatened that much more was coming. Turns out that she was married to a white supremacist and a standing member of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. FAIR was a group with the singular mission of limiting immigration to the United States, and the founder of FAIR, John Taunton, had expressed a desire for America to remain majority white.

  All of this was in Esme’s file, and I found it out when I dug deeper into it. There was quite a bit of information in the file about Esme’s background, as well as quite a bit of information about Aria and her life. Esme didn’t confess to the cops, which was a good thing, although I could see, from the interrogation transcripts, that the interrogating cops really tried their hardest to get her to confess. They tried every trick in the book – good cop, bad cop, freezing her out, giving her lots of pop, then not letting her use the bathroom, and a promise to go easy on her if she just told them what they wanted to hear. Esme fell for none of it, thank God.

  Now, it was time to get her story.

  After about a half hour, Esme appeared in the room. She was shackled, both her hands and legs, and she was dressed in an orange jumpsuit that hung on her tiny frame. Her skin was light and freckled, her blue eyes inquisitive and intelligent. Her blonde hair was thick and course and hung down to her shoulders. When she saw the two of us, she smiled, her teeth straight and white. She nodded her head slightly to the two of us.

  I stood up when she walked in, and the guard went back to his station. “Ms. Gutierrez,” I said, “good to meet you.”

  “You must be the lawyer Steve was telling me about,” she said. “I hope you can take me on, because you’re my last hope, amiga. You don’t want to talk to me, I’m stuck with whatever lawyer the state of California wants to throw at me. This is my life we’re talking about. They want to put a needle in my arm. I didn’t do it, Ms. Collins. I loved Aria. Loved her like a sister. I would have never hurt her.”