by JF Freedman
So practical so quickly? I didn’t think that then, but I did later. “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “It’ll all work out.”
“It will,” he vowed. “I promise. Listen, I probably woke you, and I have to go, the bus is about to leave for the airport, but I’ll call you later. And Jessica …”
He paused, so I filled in the silence. “What, Jeremy?”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Which I did. And still do. But now, not only with passion, but with desperation.
There’s another reason I’m putting on the Ritz tonight. Things have been kind of iffy between Jeremy and me since he got back from Europe. To begin with, he stayed an extra two weeks to finish the album. And since he’s been back, there has been some distance between us. I think he feels guilty that he cancelled our trip for his own personal needs, at the very time I was so needy myself. When you feel that kind of guilt, you breed resentment toward the other person. That doesn’t make sense logically, but it’s human nature. I’ve been there in other circumstances, so I recognize the signs. I haven’t been a barrel of laughs either, which adds to the strain. Roberto Salazar’s arrest, and the shitstorm of anger that followed it, was a deep cut to my psyche. I’ve been wanting Jeremy to take care of me, protect me, and ward off the blows. But he hasn’t done that. He feels my pain, but he isn’t going to ride shoulder to shoulder with me into battle. He has no interest in the whole business of law and courts and the system, because he thinks the system is corrupt and rigged (often, I can’t blame him). He tolerates what I do because he’s with me, not because he believes in what I do. And even though he’s a liberal on paper, he doesn’t get it that scumbags deserve as good a defense as nice people.
It’s been that way with us since the beginning. He’s an artist. His art, and me, is his life. He has blinders on about everything else, and he’s comfortable with that, he likes being narrowly focused. That’s how an artist has to live, I know, but it can cause friction with those of us who have to live in the real world.
Tonight, we’re going to shed all that stress, like a snake shedding its old skin for the new one. I’m going to will that to happen. That old homily about today being the beginning of the rest of your life? Well, tonight, that will really be true. There is no other path for us.
He brings a bottle of wine, a decent Chardonnay that sells at Trader Joe’s for about fifteen dollars. I have to be careful not to drink too much, now that I am with child. Besides, I don’t want to screw up dinner. I did open the oysters already; they’re on ice in the fridge. Drinking and handling a knife, even a dull oyster blade, is dangerous to your health. I did that once and wound up in the emergency room, getting my hand bandaged. Hurt like hell. And a bloody palm would really spoil the mood.
We’ll drink champagne, smooch, feed each other oysters straight from the shell. We’ll be the way we were when we first started courting and couldn’t keep our hands off each other. In love and lust again, which conquers all.
But first, we have to talk.
I curl up on the sofa, shoes off, legs tucked under me. Jeremy, drink in hand, sprawls out next to me, stretching out his stork-like arms and legs. His looks are unconventional, but to me he’s rakishly handsome, always has been.
Now that the moment of truth is upon us, I’m like a cat on a hot tin roof. What I’m about to spring on him is monumental. “I have something to tell you,” I say. “It’s important.”
“Me, too.” His knee starts jiggling, a nervous gesture.
That he also has something important to tell me throws me off. This entire evening has been exquisitely orchestrated to get us to this moment. I don’t want any distractions. But I know that whatever it is he has to get off his chest, it won’t be as critical as what I’m going to tell him. So I graciously say to him, “You go first.”
“No, you.”
“Jeremy.” I stroke his arm. “Come on. Tell me.”
He shakes his head. “Jessica …”
Enough with beating around the bush. We have to get this over with. “All right,” I say. I’m the one who set this up—I’ll take the initiative. I’m bursting from holding back my news anyway. I pause, then take the plunge. “I’m pregnant.”
And as the words are halfway out of my mouth, hovering phantomlike in the air, he blurts out, “I’m leaving you.”
We stare at each other in shock and disbelief.
He reacts first. “You’re pregnant?” He’s normally pale anyway, but now he looks like a ghost.
I feel as if I’m drowning. “Why?” I blubber.
“It’s …” He shakes his head and waves his hands in the air, as if trying to ward off an incoming evil spirit. Then he collapses into himself. “I’ve met someone.”
Oh, man. I never saw that coming. “Who? Where?”
“It’s … she’s …” He gets up and starts to pace. He’s too nervous to sit, he needs to put space between us. “The woman from the group I recorded the album with,” he informs me forlornly.
I’m shaking. This was going to be the most wonderful night of my life, the payoff for all those years of misery I endured. Now everything is ashes in my mouth.
“That’s why you didn’t want me to come,” I say, thinking out loud. Jesus Christ, it was right there in front of me. How could I have been so blind?
“Not exactly,” he temporizes. “I mean …”
“Yes, exactly!” I throw in his face. “You went to Europe, you met this woman, she seduced you, you serenaded each other with your stupid fucking instruments, and that was it! Three years of a life together, down the drain!”
“Jessica, it’s not like that.” He’s bleating like a baby. “Listen, please.”
“To what? Some excuse that will explain everything, so we can skip away laughing and singing?” I’m over the top, screaming at him through my tears. “I love you, you bastard! And I’m carrying your child! Our child!”
He stares at me, so miserably. Then he looks away. The coward can’t even face me.
“Why?” Now I’m begging, which infuriates me, I feel so small, so impotent; but I can’t help it, the pain is excruciating. “Why, Jeremy? What did I do?”
“Nothing, Jess. You didn’t do anything.”
“Then why?” I plead. “There has to be a reason. What is it? What did I do wrong?” I’m on my knees in front of him. Screw my ego, you can’t worry about shame at a time like this. “Tell me. Whatever it is, I’ll fix it. Just tell me what to do, because I can’t lose you.” I’m sobbing uncontrollably. “I can’t. Not now. Especially not now.”
He extracts my hands from the death grip they have on his legs. “There’s nothing to fix. We had a great time together, but now it’s over.” He stands up. “I have to go.”
He grabs his coat and heads for the door. I waylay him, putting my body between him and escape.
“You can’t leave me, Jeremy. I’m having a baby. Our baby. You can’t leave now.”
“I don’t want a baby. I’ve always been clear about that.” He groans. “You’re going to have to have an abortion, Jessica. Because we … you … are not having this baby. Any baby.”
I stare at him, slack-jawed. “An abortion? Are you crazy? I’ve wanted a baby for years. Now I’m finally pregnant and I’m going to get rid of it?” I grab his arm in a death grip. “I’m thirty-five years old. If I don’t have this baby, I’ll never be able to have another one. I can’t abort it. I won’t.”
“Then you’ll have to raise it yourself.” He’s so cold now. In the blink of an eye, it’s as if we barely know each other, or ever did.
“But you’re the father. You’re going to be involved.” Defiantly, I throw in his face, “Whether you want to be or not.”
Jeremy steps back. And then he says the five words no woman, no matter how awful the circumstances, can tolerate: “Are you sure it’s mine?”
I’m the one who ran fifty miles a week for six months to train for the marathon. I’m t
he one who lifted weights, made a fetish of Pilates, crunched three hundred sit-ups a day on the exercise ball. I take a step back, to get traction. And as I scream at him, “You son of a bitch!,” I throw a right cross that Muhammad Ali in his prime would envy.
Jeremy has a long, delicate, aquiline nose. Millennia of selective breeding by his forbears went into the crafting of that aristocratic Hebraic schnoz. Now, as my enraged fist slams through the delicate flesh into the spongy cartilage, his nose flattens across his face like a collapsed soufflé.
Immediately, blood gushes out, all over. “Jesus Christ!” he screams. “Are you insane?”
“So what if I am?” I fire back. I grab a dish towel and shove it at his face. “Don’t drip all over my rug.”
He holds the towel to his ruined nose. His face is swelling, especially around the eyes. His entire head is going to be black and blue tomorrow.
“You could have messed up my embouchure,” he hurls at me, barely able to speak. “You could have ruined my entire career.”
If my punch had landed two inches lower, it would have. Damn, I wish I had thought of that. “Cry me a river.” I throw open the front door. “Get out, you asshole. Your fucking embouchure,” I taunt him. “Who gives a shit about your embouchure?”
He staggers outside, almost tripping on the front steps. “You didn’t have to do that, Jessica,” he moans in parting. “That wasn’t necessary.”
What a baby. He’s so into his own cocoon, it’s laughable. “Do you want me to call the paramedics? For your embouchure?”
“No.”
He weaves down the sidewalk to his car, fingers the keys out of his pocket, remotes it open. “You shouldn’t have hit me,” he lisps between cracked lips. From the sound of his voice, I may have knocked out some teeth. I hope I did.
“So sue me. If you have the guts, which you don’t.”
He gets into his car and drives away. I go back inside and slam the door. Then I collapse in a sobbing heap on the floor. I’m pregnant, I’m alone, and I just blew three hundred dollars on a dinner I’m about to throw into the garbage.
TWENTY-FOUR
ROBERTO SALAZAR IS IN the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, charged with the last Full Moon Killing. He is being held in the jail’s special maximum-security section, where they house the most dangerous and notorious prisoners. These inmates are under twenty-four-hour surveillance, visually and on camera, to ensure that there will never be any question that they have been mistreated, and that they don’t kill themselves before the state can do the job. The lights in their cells are always on. They can’t even pee without being watched as closely as if they were under a microscope. Because of the extreme surveillance requirements, and to prevent their being prey to any crazed psycho craving his fifteen minutes of fame, they are totally segregated from the general population. O.J. was locked up in this section. So were the Hillside Stranglers—Buono and Bianchi, the Menendez brothers, and other figures of grisly notoriety.
Normally in murder cases it takes years to get from the initial arrest to the actual trial. Phil Spector, to cite a recent example, walked around a free man for four years before the state managed to wrangle him into a courtroom. Finding and dealing with witnesses, sifting through mountains of evidence, setting up experts, defense lawyers leaving, new ones coming in (who have to be brought up to speed)—it’s a slow slog, like swimming through a sea of molasses. But the District Attorney is ramming this one through. He wants to keep it fresh in the public’s mind. And Roberto Salazar is not a deep-pockets celebrity who can pay a battery of high-priced lawyers to delay his day of reckoning. He’s a nonentity off the street who has to take whatever legal representation the state is willing to give him.
Which is going to be us: the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s office. Salazar will be defended by us, a decision that generated considerable debate. Michael Judge, who has to navigate petty, perilous, and pernicious political waters, thought it might be better (meaning less controversial) if a private lawyer was brought in to defend him, and some of the other top brass supported that idea. That’s not unusual. For example, anytime there is a trial where there are multiple defendants, only one can be defended by our office. The others must have outside lawyers to avoid any possibility of conflict of interest. (The state foots the bill.) The reasoning behind off-loading this case was not because an outsider could do a better job, but because of Salazar’s previous history with us. Specifically, with me. By getting him off in his earlier trial, I had, through my association with him, become an accomplice in this latest murder. Unwittingly, certainly, but still an accomplice.
No one has ever said that to my face. No one had to. Wayne Dixant was a bullying asshole for calling me out the way he did, but he was right. It didn’t matter that I had done what I was supposed to do, what every lawyer is supposed to do—give the client the best defense possible. It was the perception that mattered. I had put a killer back on the street, which had allowed him to kill again.
After a few days of hand-wringing and dithering, the powers that be decided our office should try the case. Part of the decision, to be cynically frank, was economic. The lawyers in the Public Defender’s office are already on salary. It won’t cost Joe Taxpayer any extra money for us to defend Salazar. Even though private lawyers who are assigned cases like this are paid less than their regular fee, the cost can still be astronomical, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Why waste that kind of money on a nobody everyone knows is guilty anyway?
The other reason we’re doing it is purer and better. It’s our job. This is why we exist: to defend those who can’t afford to defend themselves. If we passed the buck every time a controversial case crossed our doorstep, we would lose our reason to be. There are thousands of counties and dozens of states around the country that either have lousy public defender offices or don’t have them at all. The maxim equal justice under the law is laughable. In those places, if you are indigent, you are going to get a bad defense, if you get one at all. I’m not saying there are a lot of innocent people in prison in Texas, for example, but if you are poor, that’s not the state you want to get arrested in—especially if you’re poor and a member of a minority. We are far from perfect here in the Golden State, but every defendant gets a competent lawyer, at least every defendant who uses a public defender. (I won’t comment on the quality of private lawyers except to say that they’re like apples—every barrel has a few rotten ones.)
What was surprising is that I was selected to be one of Salazar’s lawyers. I’m not the lead, I don’t have the experience. I have never tried a capital case; this will be my first one. My superior, Joe Blevins, one of our best and most experienced trial lawyers, is the front man. I’m sitting second chair. But I’ll be there, every day, for all the world to see.
My assignment was not only unexpected, it was controversial, as you can imagine. Some people in the office were afraid it would look as if we were rubbing salt into a wound. Others worried about the public’s reaction. There has been blowback on talk radio, Steve Lopez’s column in the L.A. Times, even some national forums. Mostly it’s been the usual windbags—Nancy Grace has thrown in her two cents, Larry King, some of the geniuses from Fox News.
None of this is affecting me, because I’ve put blinders on. I don’t read anything about the case, I don’t listen or watch any news shows that touch on it. I could be living on the world’s most remote desert island as far as any news about this case reaching me. I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it the best I can.
I’m on this case for two reasons. The first is that my boss wanted me on it. “This will be a defining moment in your career,” he told me when the idea was initially broached. “You’re a good lawyer, and this department needs all the good lawyers it can get. I’m hoping you’ll stay for a long time, and if you do, you’ll be handling many cases like this one. You need the right training for them, and you’ll get it with me.”
The second reason is personally gu
t-wrenching. Salazar wanted me to represent him; he requested me specifically. When I was told he had made that request, I panicked. The prospect of defending him again, this time on a charge of such magnitude, scared the shit out of me, particularly since my gut reaction, like everyone else’s, was that he actually is the Full Moon Killer. Rationally, I wanted him to be properly represented, but emotionally, I didn’t want to be the one to do it.
I had to put those feelings aside, too. My job is to defend people, not judge them. I can do that in the private recesses of my heart, but not in the open world. All my life I’ve fought against that, because for me, it’s personal. So many times, in so many situations, I could have been (and was) judged unfairly, wrongly. Starting with my mother, who was always reminding me I was a loser, then to the schools where I didn’t fit in; until I was out of my teens, I was an outcast. I was judged not for who I was, but what people thought I was. That was a long time ago, but I still feel those stings.
So after I got over my initial shock and panic about being Salazar’s lawyer again, I realized I had been doing to him what I hated for others to do to me. A heavy recognition that jolted me back into balance.
He probably is guilty. If he is, and the state proves it and a jury convicts him, so be it. But I will defend him the best I can. It’s not about him—it’s about me. My self-esteem, my dignity. I want to keep them as intact as I can. Doing this will help me.
Still, the prospect of getting back into the lion’s den has been tough. And that was before Jeremy dropped his bomb on me. But I have to stay strong. Self-pity is an easy emotion to fall into, but it’s deadly, like falling asleep in a snowstorm—your body wants to, your mind wants to, but you know that if you do, you will never wake up.
TWENTY-FIVE
JOE AND I WALK from our office to the county jail. It’s only a few blocks, and it’s faster and easier to walk than drive and hassle the parking. We present ourselves at the appointed time, and they whisk us right in. They are not going to diddle us on a case of this importance; they don’t want to give us any reason, no matter how trivial, to cry foul. Moments later, Roberto Salazar, escorted by two jail deputies, is brought into the interview room. He’s handcuffed and shackled, so his gait is like a ninety-year-old man’s brittle shuffle. He looks us over with eyes that have gone dull and guarded from confinement. No longer is he the sweet, naive, optimistic lover of humanity I defended earlier. Now he’s a sullen, angry prisoner who has no faith in the system or trust in anyone who works for it, including Joe and me. I understand why he feels this way, but it hurts to see it. The bastards grind you down. That’s their objective, and they do the job well.