The Ancient Rain

by Domenic Stansberry

  “I don’t see the reason to exclude this witness,” she said at last.

  “Your Honor,” Jensen objected, “the state has taken multiple depositions from Ms. Nakamura—all riddled with contradiction. Either she is not altogether competent, or the state is coaching—”

  “The defense will have a chance to point out these contradictions during cross-examination,” said Judge Jackson. “In the meantime, let’s proceed with Ms. Elise Younger. I believe she is next on the prosecution’s docket.”

  * * *

  There was often a certain theater, an electricity, to the moment when the aggrieved took the stand and peered down from the witness chair toward the table of the accused. Elise Younger had waited for it, Blackwell knew, with considerable hunger. After weeks of proximity, watching Owens from across the aisle, brushing against the family in the corridors, hours on the hard benches, Elise shifted in her skirt now, rising at the sound of her name. Owens, meanwhile, sat with his hands together, maintaining his posture, neither particularly attentive nor dismissive. Most of all, refraining from the impulsive gesture. The shaking of the head. The twisted smile. Anything that could be interpreted as arrogance in the face of grief.

  He had been carefully coached, no doubt, as had Elise.

  Blackwell knew that verdicts were often handed down on the basis of moments such as these—by personal associations the lawyers ultimately could not anticipate. By the fact that Elise Younger, perhaps, reminded the juror in the second row of his high-school English teacher. That Bill Owens’s son resembled a brother who had died years ago. That a flicker in the lighting overhead gave Blackwell himself the appearance of a perpetual scowl. Like other attorneys who worked in this building, he sometimes patted his face with a faint powder.

  Some people might mock him, but it wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t invented the fluorescent light.

  Blackwell wore his bluest suit. He had thick hair, and he was fit, but not too fit. The imperfection helped, he knew, because people did not trust anyone who looked too good. Jensen, on the other hand, tipped too far toward the slovenly these days. His Nordic looks had grown too jowly, too thick.

  Blackwell started by projecting a map onto a screen, showing the path Elise and her mother had driven to the bank that day. He had an evidentiary purpose, but another purpose as well—to capture for the jury the texture of the day, the girl riding on the hot vinyl in the Ford Falcon down Judah Street, the mother with her hands on the wheel, the big purse on the seat bench between them. He wanted the jury to see the mother in the checkered blouse, adjusting on her face the horn-rimmed shades that would later tumble from her fingers in the bank.

  “You entered the parking lot from the north side of Judah, as shown on the map.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you waited in the car.”

  “I was listening to the radio.”

  “So, as to the events of that day, is it true you delivered an account to the police at that time, and identified, with the aid of a sketch artist and file photos, two of the suspects in the robbery?”

  Jensen objected, as Blackwell expected he would, challenging a childhood memory from almost thirty years before: an eyewitness account blurred and faded by time.

  Judge Jackson overruled. She motioned for Blackwell to continue.

  “What happened next?”

  “We pulled into the parking lot, and there was a woman sitting there, on a bench. I noticed her because of her hat—a floppy hat, like people were wearing then, with the big brim.”

  They dwelled on the woman for a while, seated as she was on that bench, situated as it was, affording a view of the street corner, of the parking lot, and of the bank itself, front entrance and side. The bench sat some forty-odd feet from the parked car, but not so far that Elise couldn’t see her mother exchange pleasantries with the woman on her way to the entrance. After her mother had entered the bank, the woman on the bench suddenly rose to her feet and started to wave. She wore dark glasses and her features were hidden in the long shadows of her hat.

  “I thought she was waving at me,” said Elise. “She was making some kind of sign, the peace sign, I didn’t know, I just waved back. But then I looked behind and saw these people, four of them, coming out of an alley.” Elise paused then, as if she were peering into that alley. “The woman on the bench…”

  “Yes?”

  “She was Japanese, I think.”

  “Objection,” said Jensen. “This is speculation on the part of the witness.”

  Jensen was right, of course. Blackwell himself, years ago, odd as it seemed now, had missed the significance of the woman on the bench. But Elise’s description had not much changed.

  “How many people, did you say, were in the alley?”

  “Four. Dressed in camping clothes, or that’s how it looked to me. And one of them gave the sign back. And the woman with the floppy hat, she went off in the other direction then.”

  “This Japanese woman…”

  Judge Jackson hit the gavel, cautioning Blackwell now for deliberately leading the jury, since the ethnic identity of the woman had not been established. It was true, the slip had been deliberate … planting a seed … preparing for things to come …

  “These four people, what did they do next?”

  “They headed across the parking lot toward the bank.”

  Elise described the figures, all dressed like men on a hunting trip, in clothes too warm for the season: camouflage jackets with big pockets, baggy pants, and hunting caps. She had thought they were all men at first, but when they came closer, two were women, she was pretty sure, one with a mop of frizzy hair crammed up under a baseball cap, and the other, more slender, her hair tied up off her neck, carrying a straw beach bag with something inside it. The bag swayed as she walked.

  They not did head toward the front entrance, where her mother had gone. They went instead to the glass doors fronting the parking lot. Because they walked so quickly, Elise did not get a good look at their faces, not on the way in to the bank.

  She did not see either their transformation on the other side of the glass doors—the instant in which the androgynous figures suddenly appeared in the bank lobby as if out of nowhere, ski masks yanked tight, pistols drawn, a sawed-off shotgun emerging from the straw bag.

  Blackwell allowed the pause to lengthen—a moment for the jury to imagine the chaos inside the bank.

  Ninety seconds.

  That’s how long the robbery had taken, more or less. Blackwell had been over the details with earlier witnesses, recreating the scene inside the bank.

  A minute and a half.

  Right now, though, he wanted the jury to think about that girl inside the car, with the AM Radio on, listening to Tommy James and the Shondells, or the Boxtops, or some damn thing, slouching in the vinyl seat, half bored, watching the cedars shift in the nagging breeze that blew off the ocean.

  “What did you do after they went inside?”

  “I was just sitting, waiting for my mother.”

  Blackwell glanced at his watch for effect.

  Inside the bank, first thing, the security guard had dropped to his knees. Blackwell had gone over this in court with the guard himself, now retired: The gangsters had pointed their guns and he’d dropped at their command, lying facedown on the tile, arms spread, letting them take his weapon. One of the intruders had started counting backward from ninety. In and out, ninety seconds! Eighty-nine! That’s all the time we have. Eighty-eight! Other witnesses had mentioned the counting as well, and when they did, Blackwell had paused—glancing first at his watch, then at Elise Younger—so the jurors would follow his gaze to the woman in the courtroom and feel the inexorable draw back to that moment, when the woman had been a girl inside the car waiting for her mother. While she’d waited, the voice inside had gone on counting, and the figure at the center of the bank waved the shotgun in a wild arc, shouting orders. Everyone down, on the floor, before my friend counts off one more number! The two voices, the m
an and the woman’s, intertwined. Eighty-four! The one voice urgent, impatient; the other harsh and mechanical—a clock ticking backward. In the midst of the confusion, the girl’s mother, Eleanor Younger, not understanding, maybe, panicking … seventy-eight!… grabbing at her purse as it slid from her shoulders … seventy-seven!… the shooter pivoting … Oh my god!… Now everyone was down on the cold tile, everyone except the tellers and the robbers … sixty-three!… the tellers doing as they were told … fifty!… emptying their money drawers, filling the straw bag and another sack as well. Then pretty soon the tellers had been forced down as well … nineteen!… as the numbers all but expired, and the sounds dwindled … rushing footsteps … a woman moaning on the floor.

  “What did you see next?”

  “Those four people, they came running across the parking lot.”

  “All four at once?”

  “There were three up front, and another trailing behind. They wore masks now, the first three did. They had to run right past our car to get to the alley.”

  “So you didn’t see their faces?”

  “Not the first three.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “He came out after the others. He scampered over between the cars, low to the ground, and disappeared for a second. When he stood back up, he didn’t have the mask on. Then he walked more slowly, calm now, like nothing had happened.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  “He walked right past the car. I was on the passenger side, and the window was down, and he looked right at me when he walked by. He seemed surprised to see me, but he just kept walking.”

  At this point, Blackwell submitted into evidence the drawings made by the sketch artist who had sat with Elise Younger the day after the killing.

  Jensen objected once again, but to no avail. Judge Jackson was letting it in, leaving the jury to decide.

  Blackwell put the first set of likenesses on the overhead: a sketch of the woman in the floppy hat. It was a full-length drawing, of a woman at a distance. Looking at it, you saw the wardrobe, the stance, the slightness of the figure. There was the sense that it could have been anyone, true, but Blackwell wanted the jury to see it for later reference.

  Then he put up another sketch, a young man with a beard and glasses, a man with unremarkable features. And beside that, a mug shot bearing a striking resemblance.

  “Did you also consult with the sketch artist on this drawing?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you make an identification based on the photos in the police file book?”

  “I did,” she said.

  “Do you remember the name of the man whom you identified?”

  Elise had waited a long time for this. She waited an instant longer, as if examining the moment in front of her, the whole business compressed into this particular instant, held in suspension. She glanced toward Owens. Blackwell had worried, but Elise held her composure. She was not overeager. When she finally spoke, her voice tremored, but the anger, the grief, it did not overwhelm the moment.

  “Bill Owens,” she said. “That was his name. The man at the table.”

  * * *

  The defense went after Elise in the cross-examination in the way Blackwell had anticipated, challenging not only her immediate testimony but what she had witnessed in the past, suggesting that the police sketches were based not on what she, herself, had seen, but on photographs the police had provided.

  Jensen attacked her testimony in the same way he might attack that of a child witness.

  The girl had not been lying, but the testimony was a lie nonetheless. Because the authorities had manipulated the distraught child into describing the people they wanted to arrest. And so Elise’s memories of the event, these many years later, were likewise distorted.

  As the cross wore on, Jensen harrowed her on other matters as well: her mental health, her obsession with Owens, the pretrial insinuations that she and Sorrentino had somehow been involved with the violence at Owens’s house.

  Though Jensen was a large man, with a reputation for defending the disenfranchised, his size at the moment, as he stepped toward Elise Younger, gave him the aura of a bully.

  “Isn’t it possible,” said Jensen, “that you have been led horribly astray?”

  “No,” Elise said. “I saw him. I saw him very clearly. And then I walked over to the bank door—and I saw my mother.” She paused, as if about to describe her dead mother. But she refrained, as Blackwell had told her. They had autopsy photos for that. “So it’s not something I have forgotten. Those moments—they are indelible in my mind.”

  Jensen pushed some more, hoping she would crack in the way she sometimes did, but Elise did not explode. Her testimony, on its own, would not be enough to sway the case, Blackwell knew; but Elise was, in her own way, convincing. Jensen did not relent. He started after her again, but the more he went on, the more the jury disliked it. Jensen had crossed the line, so that it was not the woman he was bullying, but the young girl peering through the glass of the bank door at her dying mother.

  When cross-examination was over, Jackson put the court into recess until the following Tuesday.

  * * *

  Blackwell would have preferred to have put Nakamura on the stand immediately, but it had been a good day. Not perfect, but Elise had held her own. He’d seen, too, at the end of the day, as Jensen gathered his papers, the brooding look on Owens’s face, his distraught wife, then the big attorney turning toward his clients with his best smile.

  I have disarmed them, Blackwell thought.

  Thirty years ago, he had thought Leland Sanford was the key. For that reason, he had never been able to identify the four people in the alley. This time around, he let the defense believe he was pursuing the same angle, but no.

  Now he knew the identities.

  Owens—counting backward. Annette Ricci and her young friend, a Chicano kid—Naz Ramirez, he was all but certain, the one who’d later died in prison—those two had been the ones with the paper sacks, going to the tellers. And the fourth one, carrying the straw bag out in the lot, the one with the trigger filed a hair too fine—

  Jan Sprague.

  How Blackwell knew—it was on account of number five, the fifth wheel, the young woman who’d been recruited to stand lookout. The Japanese woman, in her floppy hat. Who’d sat on the bench on Judah Street and met the gang later, at the mouth of the alley, driving getaway, taking them to Aptos in John Panarelli’s station wagon.

  Cynthia Nakamura, the woman in the sketch.

  So when Blackwell left the courtroom, he felt good about his chances. Maybe even a little smug. The case wasn’t won, by any means, he knew that. The defense would try to discredit Nakamura. But if nothing else, he would pull Ricci and Sprague back on the stand. Go after them for perjury, lying about their whereabouts. The whole dynamic would change. A little pressure and they would unravel, he was all but certain. But the following afternoon, as he sat with his wife in San Mateo, on the patio, trying not to think about the case, working a crossword instead, he got a call from Laguna. Cynthia Nakamura had taken a turn for the worse, a respiratory infection, early-stage pneumonia. “I think she’ll recover from this,” said the nurse. “With antibiotics. Though it might take some time.” Blackwell started to work immediately, repositioning his witnesses, filing for delay, but in the end it didn’t matter. The next day, before he could put a motion to the judge, the nurse called him again. Cynthia Nakamura had expired in her sleep.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  On the day of the closing arguments, Dante ran across Guy Sorrentino on Larkin, on the edge of the Tenderloin. Dante had been in the Civic Center, delivering some documents, and had walked outside into the plaza. The scene was not unfamiliar. It was just past lunch, the office workers returning, clerks and lawyers in scattered pairs, while a woman from Code Pink stood on the steps, just outside the security perimeter, in a pink shirt and black tights, handing out pamphlets. Farther on, at the center of the plaza, a trio
of young men, all dressed in gray suits, tossed dollar bills into the air, play money, while a clown balanced himself on an oil barrel, and a woman in fatigues waved a plastic carbine. Street theater, lunchtime entertainment—but the sky was drizzling a slow and steady rain, and the audience was small and laughed a bit too hard. A group of homeless loitered by the trees under a sign that read FOOD NOT BOMBS. There was in the air a simmering anger, righteous, frustrated. Around the corner, out in front of the Federal Building, a different group, in JAMS and polyester, baseball caps and pleated skirts, carried signs that read JUSTICE FOR ELEANOR YOUNGER. There was the same sense of injury here, the same sense of justice unsatisfied.

  After Nakamura’s death, Blackwell had struggled to make his case. Judge Jackson had allowed the jury to watch the depositions, but the videos were contradictory, not altogether cogent. Still, the verdict wasn’t in, and it was hard to say what a jury might do.

  * * *

  Dante spotted Guy Sorrentino from a distance, halfway up the block, emerging from Cholino’s, a dive frequented by vice officers and washed-up cops. The man wore his sports jacket and a white shirt, and his belly hung over his gray trousers. Hatless, with his balding pate and winged hair, he resembled an overweight parrot whose wings had been clipped—a grayish bird in a dirty white shirt. When he recognized Dante, he gave his fellow investigator a look of disgust. They had not encountered each other, face-to-face, since that day in the Mission.

  “So—you have made your slander.”

  Ordinarily, Dante would have ignored such a taunt, but he was tired of Guy Sorrentino. The man had a little American flag on his lapel and smelled vaguely of beef.

  “You like to ruin people,” said Sorrentino.

  “I didn’t ruin you.”

  “Anything but the truth. But you know that. You just pretend not to know.”

  Dante knew he should walk away, but something held him there, listening to the old man. It was a dirty street, noisy with traffic, horns wailing up and down, and the people you saw, hurrying along, chests forward, looked to have come from some fresh argument.