Judgment Calls

by Alafair Burke

  The perfect life didn’t last long. Roger landed a job as in-house counsel with Nike, so we wound up moving to Portland after only a couple of years in New York. A few months later, I discovered that my husband had taken literally his new employer’s ad slogan encouraging decisive, spontaneous, self-satisfying action. We both thought I would be working late preparing for a trial set to start the following day, but the case had settled with a last-minute guilty plea. My intention was to surprise Roger by coming home early with dinner and a movie in hand.

  Instead, I found him doing it with a professional volleyball player on top of our dining room table. I got the house and everything in it, but I made sure he got the table.

  Now Grace and I rarely referred to my former husband as anything other than Shoe Boy or for any reason other than comic. We definitely never insinuated that I was somehow responsible for his infidelities.

  “That’s totally unfair, Grace. You know that Chuck and I have been nothing more than friends since I came back to town. Unlike some people, I took my marriage vows seriously.”

  “Come on, Sam. I’m not saying Roger was justified to whore around. I’m just saying he might have been bothered when you and Chuck started spending time together again. Roger thought leaving New York was going to change things, but you were still putting in the same kind of hours and running thirty miles a week. Then you started making time for Chuck. Say what you want about only being friends, but to Roger it was more than that, even if you weren’t technically cheating. He had to have seen the chemistry; everyone does. You drop that hard-ass force field of yours with me and with Chuck, but you never dropped it with Roger. And if he was bothered by it, the next guy will be too. So, unless you want to be alone for good, you need to decide where Chuck Forbes fits into your life. You’re not in high school anymore, honey.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “You pissed?” she asked.

  “No, just surprised.”

  “I know. I get sucked in by you two also, but I worry about you, is all. This isn’t college, when you could sleep with Chuck on breaks and then run back to Cambridge. Make sure you know what you’re doing.” She smiled. “Don’t get me wrong. I have noticed how good he looks in that uniform of his.”

  I returned the smile and said, “At least I’m not writing Mrs. Charles Landon Forbes, Jr., in my notebook anymore.”

  We quickly changed the subject, but the conversation nagged at me throughout the rest of the meal. Roger used to accuse me of being ambivalent about our relationship; now Grace was suggesting the same thing about my feelings for Chuck. The way I’d always seen it, my job was hard enough; the personal stuff should take care of itself.

  3

  Work returned to a normal pace the next day.

  I had left several messages on Andrea Martin’s machine the day before but hadn’t heard back from her. This morning, she picked up.

  “Ms. Martin, my name is Samantha Kincaid. I’m a deputy district attorney for Multnomah County. How are you?”

  “Could be better, under the circumstances and all.”

  “I left a few messages for you yesterday,” I said.

  “Yeah, I didn’t get ’em till late. I wait tables at the Hot-cake House at night. I was planning on trying to call you back later.”

  “My understanding is that the police have talked to you about what happened over the weekend. Is that right?”

  “Yeah. One of ’em, Mike somebody, called me in the middle of the night Saturday. Told me Kendra was in the hospital. I’d just gotten off work, but I would’ve come down anyway. I guess Kendra didn’t want me there, though.”

  “Where is Kendra now?”

  “I think she’s in her room. I’m just heading out for my day job at Safeway.”

  “Did you know where Kendra was on Saturday night when this happened?”

  “No. She runs away so much I’ve stopped calling the cops on her. She just gets mad at me when they pick her up. I’m to the point I just want her to come home every night. I figure I got a better chance if I give her her freedom. The other way sure wasn’t working.”

  “So she came home on Sunday afternoon then?”

  “Yeah. She didn’t want to. I don’t know what’s so bad around here that she’d rather be out on the street. But the hospital wouldn’t let her go unless she came here or agreed to foster care. At least she picked here.”

  “She’s been through a lot. She might want your help right now.”

  She laughed. “Miss … what’d you say your name was again?”

  “Samantha Kincaid. Call me Samantha.”

  “Well, you obviously don’t know my daughter. She don’t want help from no one. Always been that way, too. It’s like she decided when she turned ten or something that she was grown.”

  “Did Detective Calabrese explain what Kendra’s lifestyle has been while she was on the street?”

  “I wouldn’t call it much of a lifestyle. But, yeah. That guy and his partner—a blond guy, real young—came by the Safeway on Sunday to break the news to me. They told me Saturday night she was assaulted. Guess they wanted to say the other stuff in person.”

  They probably wanted to watch her response. Kids who run away are often the victims of abuse by their parents. If anything would set a parent off, it would be learning that their kid has been shooting up and turning tricks. They wanted to make sure she didn’t seem the type to take her anger out on Kendra physically.

  “How has Kendra been doing since she’s been home?”

  “Alright, I guess. Like I said, she don’t really talk to me.”

  “Well, I was calling mainly to introduce myself and to let you know I’m handling the case. The police have arrested one of the suspects. His name is Frank Derringer. He’s in jail for now, but we have to take the case to a grand jury within a week, and Kendra’s going to need to testify for that. I’ve got it scheduled for Friday. Assuming the grand jury indicts Derringer, the court will schedule the case for trial. Most cases don’t actually go to trial, but if this one does, it will probably be in a couple of months and Kendra will need to testify. Do you have any questions for me?”

  “Do you know when the cops are going to give Kendra her stuff back? Her keys were in her purse, and I don’t know whether to get a new set cut.”

  “I’m not really sure, Ms. Martin. It can take the crime lab a few weeks sometimes to finish working on evidence. Depending on what they find, we may need to keep the evidence sealed for trial. I can find out about her keys for you, if you’d like.”

  “Whatever. I can get a new set cut at the store tomorrow. Am I going to have to come to any of these things? I can’t afford to take time off work.”

  “You’re certainly welcome to come with Kendra as support, but I don’t think you’ll need to testify until the trial. I’ll make sure Kendra has transportation to the courthouse when she needs to come down here.”

  “Alright, then. I better be going. You need anything else?”

  “Would it be OK if I dropped by your home tonight to meet Kendra?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to talk to her about that. You want me to get her?”

  “No, that’s OK, I’ll try talking to her later.” If Mom didn’t care, I’d rather just drop in on Kendra unannounced. Wouldn’t want her running off anywhere. “Feel free to call me if you have any questions. Let me give you my direct line.”

  “Um, I can’t find a pen right now. If I need anything, I can look it up, right?”

  I told her that she could, even though I knew she wouldn’t.

  I devoted the rest of my day to the routine drudgeries of the drug section of the Drug and Vice Division. The DA assigned me to DVD because I used to prosecute drug cases when I was in New York. I accepted the assignment because I wanted to keep working as a prosecutor when Roger and I moved, and the Portland U.S. Attorney’s Office wasn’t hiring. In most people’s eyes it was a step down: I went from handling cases involving nationwide distribution conspiraci
es and literally tons of dope to prosecuting sad-sack hustlers for dealing eight-balls of methamphetamine and as little as a single rock of crack cocaine.

  But while I may have lost the prestige of a federal prosecutor’s office, I had developed a niche as part of the vice section of DVD, prosecuting the monsters who lure, coerce, and force women into prostitution. The less-experienced DVD attorneys shied away from those cases because they were hard to prove, hard to win, and hard to take. The career prosecutors who handled the major felony person crimes didn’t want them because they were viewed as less important than murders and other violent offenses. But I felt more rewarded by those cases than I’d ever felt prosecuting even complex federal drug conspiracies.

  Today, however, my plate was full of drug charges. No surprise, the grand jury returned indictments on all four of the cases I presented. Most drug-related cases are pretty much the same. The only variation tends to be in the type and degree of stupidity involved.

  Usually it was a matter of poor strategy. My daily caseload is full of tweekers who agree to let the police search them, even though they’re carrying enough dope to land them in the state pen for a couple of years. Apparently, an undocumented side effect of dope is a gross overestimation of one’s own intelligence. Dopers become convinced they’ve hidden their stash so well a cop won’t find it. They’re always wrong.

  But sometimes it goes beyond poor strategy to straight-out stupidity. In one of today’s cases, two men did a hand-to-hand drug deal standing two feet from a Portland police officer. What stealth tactic had this shrewd officer used to avoid detection? He was part of the city’s mounted patrol unit, which covered a downtown beat on horseback. When the men were arrested, one of them said to the officer, “Dude, I didn’t even see you up there, man. I just thought it was cool that a horse had found its way to the park.” It hadn’t dawned on them to look up and see whether someone might have accompanied the savvy equine.

  Despite all the talk about the modern “war on drugs,” the truth is that most police don’t go out of their way to investigate minor drug offenses. They don’t have to. There is so much dope out there, and the people taking it are so dense, that the cases literally fall into the cops’ laps, whether they want them or not. The upside is that it makes my job easier.

  When I was done getting my cases indicted, I called MCT to see if a detective could drive out to Rockwood with me to interview Kendra. I wanted to talk to her tonight, before she got antsy and ran away again. Grand jury was Friday, and I needed to know what to expect from my star witness.

  I try to have a police officer or DA investigator with me whenever I talk to someone who will be testifying in one of my cases. If the witness ever went south on me, I’d want a person present who could testify about the witness’s statement, since lawyers are not allowed to testify in their own cases.

  Someone picked up after four rings. “Walker.”

  “Detective Walker, it’s Samantha Kincaid at the DA’s office. I’m calling about the Derringer case.”

  “Sure. What can I do you for?”

  I told him what I’d found out the day before from Deputy Lamborn and Dave Renshaw.

  “Oh, hang on a sec. The rest of the guys have got to hear this.” I heard him put me on speaker. “You want to tell ’em or should I?”

  Figuring I was more likely than Walker to keep the conversation on track, I repeated the information about Derrick Derringer’s previous offer to serve as an alibi witness for his brother and then got to the part about Derringer’s body hair.

  Walker couldn’t help himself. “Can you believe what a fucking waste of time and money that is? Everyone knows these guys never change. They just get off having someone watch them watch that smut. But the system manages to find the money to pay some doctor to handle these guys’ johnsons, when it could use the money to keep them in the pen where they belong.”

  I heard Ray Johnson nearby. “How many times I gotta tell you that you make my workplace hostile when you call something like that a johnson, man? So, Kincaid, what’s the doctor say about Derringer’s broken pecker?”

  I certainly didn’t know what it meant. “Look, five different shrinks could probably come up with five interpretations. What’s important is that we know Derringer shaved within a few days of the attack. That’s big. Any news on that end?”

  “No,” Walker replied. “The lab’s still working the rape kit and the other evidence. No leads on who this second guy is. Ray’s looking at Derringer’s known associates from before he went to the pen, but nothing yet. So far, Derringer’s only calls from the jail have been to his brother. He’s playing it cool.”

  “Alright, let me know if you get anything new. Also, I need one of you to come out to Kendra Martin’s with me tonight. Grand jury’s on Friday, and I want to prep this girl while she’s still on board.”

  “Geez. I really want to help you out on this one, since you’re going out of your way for us. But my anniversary’s tonight. The wife’s got the whole night planned: dinner, some dance thing. She’ll kill me if I cancel on her.”

  “Don’t let me mess up your marriage. It doesn’t really matter who goes. I just need a witness.”

  “Hold on. Hey, Ray. Can you run out to Rockwood with Kincaid tonight to interview the Martin girl? She wants to get her ready for grand jury on Friday, and she needs a witness.”

  “Depends what you mean, can I go? I can go, if it needs to be done. But Jack, you know my mama flew up from Cali today. She’s probably at my house waitin’ on me as we speak. What kind of boy am I to go on OT while my mama’s in town? Can I go out with her tomorrow, or does it have to be tonight?”

  I heard another voice farther in the background. “Go home to your mama, Ray. I’ll go.”

  Uh-oh. I knew that voice. “That’s alright, Jack,” I said hastily. “It’s probably better to go out there with someone who’s already met Kendra. It can wait until tomorrow.”

  “It’s up to you, but Chuck can go. He’s met the Martin girl too. He and Mike went to talk to the mom on Sunday and stopped by the house to check on Kendra.” He yelled into the background, “Hey, Chuck. You get a pretty good rapport with the girl?”

  I heard something; then Ray came back on the line. “Yeah, he says things went real good. He took over some CDs that were donated by the rape victims’ advocates.”

  There was no easy way out of this one. I wanted to talk to Kendra tonight, and Chuck made as much sense to take along as anyone. “If he’s willing to go, that works for me. Can you ask him to meet me in front of the Martin house at seven?”

  * * *

  He was waiting for me with a Happy Meal in one hand. He held the box up as I got out of my car in front of Kendra Martin’s house. “Mommy Martin didn’t strike me as the type to make sure there was a pot roast on the table by supper-time. I figured Kendra might want something to eat. I would’ve picked up something for you, but then I pictured you trying to run it off at midnight.”

  “Very funny.” Call me an extremist; I have a tendency to couple large meals with monster runs. It had been two months since we’d seen each other, and he was already trying to pull me into our flirtatious rhythm. I was determined to make this quick, but as I started walking to the front door, I realized he wasn’t following.

  I turned around and walked back to where he still stood with a grin on his face. “What the hell’s so funny, Forbes?”

  “Oh, so it’s Forbes now?”

  “Hey, you’ve always called me Kincaid.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve always called me Chuck. Am I supposed to call you something different now too?”

  “You can call me whatever you want, as long as you keep your smart-ass comments to yourself while I interview Kendra Martin.”

  “They teach you those manners at Hah-vud?”

  “Give me a break. Last time I checked, that little park we call the waterfront was still named after your daddy.”

  “Yeah, and look at all the good that being the g
overnor’s son has done me. Driving fifteen miles out of my way on my night off for your interview, standing here with a McMeal for your witness. The last time I checked, Kincaid, you and I were still friends. Would it kill you to at least say hi to me before we head in for work?”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “No, it wouldn’t. You’re right. Hi. Hi, Chuck. It’s nice to see you. Now can we go do my interview?”

  “Yes. And it’s nice to see you too.”

  I rang the doorbell. I could hear obnoxious music, the kind that started to sound like noise when I turned thirty, blaring from inside. I rang the doorbell again and then banged on the door. I felt him standing behind me while we waited on the porch in silence. When I heard the music get lower and footsteps approach the door, I looked at him over my shoulder. “That was nice of you. To bring her some dinner, I mean.”

  “Thanks.”

  I couldn’t tell what Kendra Martin looked like when she answered the door, because her face was obscured by a big pink gum bubble. It popped to reveal a thin pale girl with doe eyes and full lips. Her wavy, dark hair stopped right below her shoulders. She wore an Eminem sweatshirt and a pair of jeans that looked like they’d fit my father. So far, she seemed like a typical thirteen-year-old.

  She looked past me at Chuck. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I came by to see whether you listened to anything I told you on Sunday. What did I tell you about looking out the window to see who’s here before you open the door to anyone?”

  She shifted her weight all the way to one leg and swung her hip one direction and tilted her head in the other. “I guess I forgot this time. Anyway, it was you, so it’s OK, right?” She twisted a lock of hair with her fingers. Obviously Chuck Forbes’s magnetism was not lost on this new generation of teenage girls.

  “OK, we’ll treat that as a test run. But I mean it: From now on, you have to look before you open that door. If it’s someone you don’t know, you don’t answer. Got it?”