by JF Freedman
“Yes, ma’am,” he says back to me.
He’s solid granite. I don’t budge him, not an inch. I don’t spend much more time with him; if your questioning is going badly, don’t compound the misery and make things worse by hanging around.
“No further questions, Your Honor.”
I walk back to the defense table. Reggie looks at me, hollow-eyed. “You let him off too easy,” he hisses in a harsh whisper. “Fucker suckered me.”
I tune him out and turn away to watch the next witness, a lab tech who will certify the heroin as real, being sworn in.
I hear a whoosh, like air escaping from a tire. “Shit,” Reggie murmurs.
My thought exactly.
By the end of the day, Lorraine has finished presenting her case. She did a tight, clean job. I wasn’t able to lay a glove on any of her witnesses. I hadn’t expected I could, but still, it’s a numbing feeling. Judge Hodgkins thanks the jury, gives them the usual admonitions about not discussing the case or watching anything about it on television or in the press, and reminds them to be back at ten tomorrow morning, when it will be my turn.
Reggie and I huddle for a moment before he’s taken back to lockup. “What happens tomorrow?” he asks.
“It’s our turn,” I say.
“What are we going to do?” His voice is heavy with doom.
The question is good. The answers aren’t. I don’t have any witnesses to counter the cops, the lab work wasn’t compromised, there wasn’t an egregious violation of the law. I only have one decision to make: do I put Reggie on the stand? I know he is his own worst enemy, but at this point, I don’t see what we have to lose. Maybe he’ll be able to charm (make that con) one juror into believing he was improperly seduced, or maybe there is a hidden sob sister who will feel sorry for him. Or maybe there is a mole in this jury, a radical who will vote against authority just because all authority is corrupt, the system screws the individual, the LAPD is racist, or one of dozens of other biases, all of which have a foundation in the truth. That kind of defense does work—again, witness O.J.—but it’s rare. The officers who set up Reggie and arrested him were brothers, so the claim of white or Latino racism against a black man won’t wash.
So, do I have Reggie testify? If I do, the odds are he’ll finish the prosecutor’s job for her. But if I don’t, the presumption of his guilt will be strengthened even more than it already is. Juries want to hear the accused’s side of the story from his own mouth. To deny that opportunity to them, even if the witness sucks, usually hurts your case.
I don’t have anything else. It’s either him telling his story, or betting all my chips on my summation. Either hand is a loser. I have to decide which one gives me slightly better odds: a thousand to one or a million to one.
“Can you handle taking the stand?” I ask him. “Without freaking out, or pissing off the judge and jury?”
We have batted this option back and forth, at length. Initially, he was all for it, but lately he’s been reluctant. He’s scared that he’ll be eviscerated on cross-examination. I don’t blame him. It’s a legitimate fear.
“Do I have to?” he asks.
“No.”
“Will it hurt if I don’t?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “I don’t have a crystal ball. Every jury is different.” I hesitate to go on, but I have to. “At this point, I don’t see that we have anything to lose.”
“You mean anything else to lose,” he corrects me. “ ’Cause from what I heard in there today, I already have lost.”
He’s finally being truthful to himself. It’s awfully late in the game, but better late than never.
“It isn’t over till it’s over,” I tell him.
His reply is flat, emotionless, candid. “It’s over. So I’ll do it, ’cause what can it hurt?”
There it is. He’s decided to be the master of his fate. I have to applaud his bravery. “All right,” I tell him, trying to sound optimistic, but knowing I don’t. “We’ll meet tomorrow morning, before court opens, to go through your story.”
As I get up to leave, he grabs my wrist to stop me. Quickly, as if he’s afraid the guard waiting outside will rush in and restrain him, he lets go.
“Sorry,” he apologizes.
“It’s okay. Is there something else?”
He stares down at the floor. “That offer the D.A. made? Do you think …?”
Now he’s ready to make a deal? “Reggie, I warned you: once we started the trial, it was off the table.”
“Yeah,” he mumbles. “You did. Should’ve listened to you.”
God, he’s so miserable. “But I’ll ask her.”
I call Lorraine Tong from my office. The answer, as I knew it would be, is an emphatic No. So tomorrow, Reggie Morton will take the stand in his defense.
Jeremy and I aren’t seeing each other tonight. Except on weekends, we usually don’t when I’m in trial. I need to be completely focused, and I can’t be if I’m with him; that’s particularly important tonight, because I have to prepare for Reggie’s testimony tomorrow, and the stakes are high. Reggie’s going down, that’s not in question. The unknown is how stiff his sentence will be. The difference could be almost a decade. He wasn’t entrapped, so I can’t play that card. But there are mitigating factors; there always are. I need for him to convince the jury that he isn’t hard-core, that he understands he did wrong and is going to turn his life around. Tomorrow morning I’ll come in early and spend an hour with him to make sure we’re on the same page. I’ll bring a Bible, in case we decide to try a Hail Mary I-found-Jesus ploy. There are lots of passages in the Good Book about forgiveness and salvation. Maybe Reggie can come up with an appropriate quote (spontaneously, of course). There may be one or two Christians on the jury who would be sympathetic to a jailhouse conversion, however belated. It’s a shameless ploy, but we aren’t playing touch football. Lorraine will have a cow, and the judge will probably put the kibosh on it and warn me not to grandstand; but when all you have are lemons …
My house is quiet when I enter. Dark, even though sundown is an hour away. I keep the shades drawn to keep it cool, and to keep it private. I have no pets. The street is small, and it isn’t a through street, so there isn’t much traffic, or noise. The house is a compact structure, one of the old clapboard Cape Cod-style bungalows that were built in the thirties and forties, when Santa Monica was still a small town. This block and a few others between Pico Boulevard and Rose Avenue have managed to withstand the upscale development that has transformed this community during the past twenty-five years, and especially the last decade, into one of the most expensive places to buy a house in the country.
If I ever sell, I’ll be set for life. But I’m not ready to do that yet. This house has too many of my old memories absorbed in its walls, its floors, its ceilings, like tobacco smoke and mildew stains. Some of those memories are bad, horrifying. But they are an essential part of me. I’m not ready to let go yet. If I get married and have a family, I’ll move, because I won’t allow my children to grow up exposed to my old ghosts. But until then, I’ll stay here. I’ve earned my claim, a hundred times over.
EIGHT
IN 1987, WHEN I was fourteen, my mother almost killed me. It was my own dumb fault. I should have known better than to try to sneak back into the house at three in the morning, given that my mother, Claire Thompson, was a paranoid lush who kept a loaded gun within close reach. It was just a peashooter .22 Ruger, a target pistol, not a gun with much stopping power, but she didn’t know that. All she knew was that it was a gun, it fired bullets, and it didn’t cost much. She had bought it at a swap meet under the table, no registration, no background check. The asshole who sold it to her out of the trunk of his car threw in a box of bullets and loaded it for her, on the spot.
We lived alone, she and I, in a perpetual state of undeclared warfare. My father had left us when I was barely out of my diapers, and I was an only child. I couldn’t blame my old man for bailing out—you can only
live with a crazy person for so long, or you’ll go nuts yourself. My only regret was that he didn’t take me with him.
My mother had decided she needed a gun out of an irrational fear that we were going to be assaulted by some nameless, faceless crazo roaming the mean streets of Santa Monica. The reality was that the possibility of our house being broken into was slim to none; where we lived was statistically one of the safest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, but my nutty mother was convinced danger was lurking everywhere. Watching the local news channels night after night—all those lurid freeway chases shot from helicopters—can really mess with your head. She had never fired the gun, nor had she ever taken a lesson in how to properly shoot it. It was available, close by, a security blanket.
So there the gun was, in the top drawer of my mother’s bedside table, half hidden under a pile of worthless Lotto tickets—unfired, untested, mostly forgotten. She had shown it to me when she brought it home, and I had hefted it in my hand out of morbid curiosity. We had a gun in the house! Cool! I wanted to take it to a deserted stretch of the L.A. River and shoot off a few rounds, but she nixed that—guns weren’t toys; you don’t fire them for fun. They are serious business, to be used only for life and death emergencies, she recited solemnly.
Even back then, at my relatively tender age, I was more practical than she was, so I pointed out that if we had the damn thing we ought to test it out, to make sure it worked right. And also to feel what firing it felt like. But she didn’t buy that sensible argument. I was to keep my hands off the goddamned gun, she warned me sternly, unless I was alone in the house and a doped-up sicko had burst in and was going to kill me. After he committed unspeakable crimes against my person, such as rape and other horrendous tortures. I don’t know where she came up with that bullshit spiel; she’d probably heard it on television.
Anyway, I never got to fire the gun.
So now it was three in the morning and I was sneaking back into my house through the kitchen window, the same window I had snuck out of earlier, after she had gone to sleep. At that specific moment in time my mind wasn’t working right, because a few hours earlier I had lost my virginity to James Cleveland, on the foldout sofa bed in the basement of his parents’ house. James was seventeen, a junior in our high school, two grades above me. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was sexy, played halfback on the football team, and all my friends were hot for him, so I was confident I had picked a winner.
All the lights in my house were out. I wriggled through the kitchen window, trying to keep as quiet as an Indian scout. James and I had celebrated my deflowering (there really was blood, which freaked out both of us a little) by drinking a couple shots from his father’s stash of designer bourbon, so I had a bit of a buzz. I could walk a straight line and talk without slurring, but my senses were a tad off, just enough so that as I was maneuvering my way through the dining room on my way to the stairs leading up to the second floor, I bumped into one of the dining-table chairs and knocked it over. Fortunately, the floor was carpeted, but the impact still made a dull sound, like a phone book dropping onto a counter.
I froze in my tracks. Had my mother heard the crash? Usually, by the time she called it a night, she was pickled enough that she would sleep through a thunderstorm. But I was scared shitless that this time would be the exception—that she would wake up, discover my deceit, and rag on me for being out at three in the morning in my street clothes, with whiskey on my breath, when earlier that night I’d concocted this big song and dance about how I was exhausted, and was going to bed immediately.
The sounds of the nighttime house—the hum of the refrigerator, the deep throbbing of our old gas heater, the slight creaks of the windows as the wind rattled the cracks—were humdrum in their normality. I carefully picked the chair up, set it back in place, and stood there, rigid, listening for my mother’s clomping footsteps; when she was in her cups, she had the finesse of a Clydesdale.
But nothing happened; she hadn’t awakened. I was free to sneak up to the safety of my bedroom. I knew how to avoid all the squeaks in the stairs, so I figured, smug little wiseass that I was, that I had pulled it off.
Halfway through my tiptoe journey up the staircase there was a sudden flash of light, like the flare of a match being struck, and at the same time I heard a pop. It wasn’t the eardrum-bursting explosion you hear in the movies when a gun goes off. It was more of a snapping sound, about as loud as when you step on a dry seaweed pod at the beach. And for an instant, the sting from the bullet was not awful. It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.
But then the pain slammed through me, searing my gut like it was on fire.
I screamed. My knees buckled; my legs turned to water. I lost my balance and fell backward down the stairs, all the way to the bottom, where I lay in a writhing heap.
The hall light popped on. My mother appeared on the landing above me. Her face was Kabuki white with bedtime facial cream. She was wearing a short nightgown; in the shadowy light, her mottled legs looked like cottage cheese. The gun was in her hand. I was losing consciousness, but I thought I saw smoke drifting out of the barrel, like in an old cowboy movie. Or maybe I was already hallucinating.
My mother was staring down at me. “Jessica?” she whispered. Then she screamed my name: “Jessica!”
“Mom,” I croaked. “Mother …”
She stood in place, as if her toes had grown roots into the floor. Her mouth was moving, but for a moment, no sound came out. Then she gasped, “I thought you were an intruder, I swear it!” She started crying, big globs of tears running down her cheeks. Her smudged makeup against the marble whiteness on her face made her look like Gene Simmons. “I thought …”
Suddenly, the crying stopped as abruptly as if she had turned off a faucet. She bared her teeth at me, like a wolf closing in on a wounded deer. “What are you doing up at this time of night?” she shrieked. “Did you sneak out again, goddamn you!”
The pain in my stomach was excruciating. I was sure I was dying, and all she could do was scream at me like a harpy.
My voice in my ears sounded as if it was coming from a ghost. With all the strength I could muster, I yelled back at her. “Call nine-one-one, you crazy fucking bitch!”
After I got out of the hospital I moved in with my aunt Jill, who lived in Bronson Canyon, an old section of Hollywood up in the hills below and slightly east of the hollywood sign. Jill wasn’t really my aunt; she was a friend of my mother’s, from when they were girls growing up in the Valley after World War II, at a time when there were still more orange groves along Victory Boulevard than houses. Like my mother, she was divorced, but she had her act together. She was a dental technician, made good money, paid her mortgage down monthly, and was a member of a travel group of single women who took two trips a year. Her house was full of knickknacks from her journeys. She loved my mother, but she understood that her childhood friend Claire was unstable and that I couldn’t live with her anymore. So she made room in her life for a sullen and withdrawn teenage girl, an act of kindness and generosity for which I will always be grateful.
For the remainder of my high school years, I went into a shell. I was enrolled in a new school in the middle of the year. I didn’t know anyone. All the cliques had been formed, all the clubs had their memberships, all the cool guys were taken. My old school had been a United Nations of races and ethnicities, but here, being white put me in a very small minority. The school population was mostly Latino, and there were a lot of blacks and Asians of dozens of stripes as well, but only a handful of Anglos. The races didn’t mix much, which was further isolating. Because I’m tall, the basketball and volleyball coaches tried to recruit me, but I shined them on. I had played sports at my old school—volleyball and track—but I didn’t want to join any of the teams at this new place. I kept my head down, did my work, and tried to be as invisible as possible.
Jill was a sweet woman, and she tried her best to provide me with a semblance of regular life, bu
t my time living with her was strained. A week after I graduated, I moved out. I got a job waitressing at Ben Frank’s on the Strip, and found a room in the heart of Hollywood, near Fountain and Orange. The other tenants were kids, dropouts and discards like me. Except for me, they were all stoners. Most of them lived on handouts from their parents and by panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard. They supplemented their incomes with menial jobs, small-time drug dealing, occasionally selling their bodies. I stayed away from that stuff, but we got along all right. I did smoke their weed and drink their alcohol.
Even though I didn’t know where I was going, or if I was going anywhere at all, for the first time in my life I was free. Sometimes I was lonely—I wasn’t as nihilistic as the people I lived with—but I got by, and slowly, little by little, I found a sense of confidence I hadn’t had since the night I felt my life bleeding out of me. I was still basically a kid who didn’t have a vision of the future beyond her next paycheck.
I had become friendly with another waitress named Maude, an actress wannabe from Arkansas with a Southern accent so thick you could pour it on pancakes. She was in her mid-twenties, sweet and cheery, and she didn’t take life too seriously. We would go out together occasionally, to a movie or a club (she was the one who scored me my phony ID card). Two single girls having fun and looking for adventure.
One day, as we were leaving work, she asked me, “Ever done any modeling, Jessica?”
That threw me. “Modeling?” I’d seen the models in the Victoria’s Secret catalog and Vogue. I was pretty enough, but I didn’t look like them, not remotely. “No.”
“Want to make some extra money?” Maude asked. “Nothing illegal or sexual,” she added, to reassure me.
“I guess.” I was getting by, but barely. Any added income would really help.
“Are you free now?”
I was going to catch the bus back to my place and do some laundry, but that wasn’t urgent. “I guess.”