Guilt by Association: A Novel

by Marcia Clark

  “Call me Colin,” he said, shaking our hands and inviting us to sit. He reminded me of a beefy Irish patrol cop. Thick of limb, heavy featured in an attractive way, he carried himself like he had a sap in one pocket and a throw-down gun in the other. Working here, he probably did. “So what can I do for you?”

  “We’re looking into some background information on Kit Chalmers.” I paused to see if the name rang a bell.

  It took a moment to register. “The one that just got killed. Yes, sad business.” Reilly’s voice showed this wasn’t the first time he’d lost a student to a violent death.

  I wanted to ask whether he’d been visited by the FBI, but if he hadn’t, I didn’t want to give him reason to question what we were doing here. The fact that he didn’t ask led me to conclude that the FBI probably hadn’t contacted him yet. This made me feel superior and insubordinate all at once. It was shaping up to be a very good day.

  “I’m looking into a truancy bust about two months before he died, and I’d like to talk to the kids he was busted with,” I said.

  “They’re Marsden students?” he asked. I nodded, and he turned to his computer.

  I gave him the names.

  “I show them as still enrolled. Morning attendance reports aren’t in yet, so I can’t say whether they’re here today. According to our records, when they got the truancy bust, they were loitering at the mini-mart a couple of blocks away, smoking and panhandling,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “So you wouldn’t remember any details, I take it?”

  He shook his head with a small smile. “That’s not exactly a standout event around here.”

  “You have a yearbook we could look at?” Bailey asked.

  He reached behind him to the metal bookcase against the wall and pulled out a large hardcover book emblazoned with MARSDEN HIGH SCHOOL and the picture of a marlin. Marsden Marlins—I had to admit, it had a ring to it. He handed the book to Bailey. She took out her digital camera, then opened the book and began turning pages.

  “Mind if we borrow that copy?” I asked.

  “Nope, just bring it back. It’d look bad if the principal didn’t have a copy of the yearbook.” Reilly glanced at his watch. “Anything else?”

  “Do you have any property Kit may have left here, by any chance?” I knew it was a long shot, but I had to ask.

  “I know we cleaned out his locker. Nothing there but textbooks and some old weed that was mostly seeds,” he said. “I can check with his counselor, though.”

  “That’d be great,” I replied.

  I joined Bailey in scanning the yearbook while Reilly called the counselor. When he hung up, he said, “She confiscated his cell phone the last time he was in school.”

  A cell phone. The way kids lived on them, this should be the Fort Knox of information. “She still have it?”

  “We’ll find out. She’s on her way over.”

  Ms. Wilder, the counselor, whose curly brown hair made her look so young I thought she was a student, showed up less than a minute later. Her hands were empty. Damn.

  We introduced ourselves, and she said, “I want to help any way I can. I’m a little uncertain, though,” she said hesitantly. Then she reached into the pocket of her thick knit cardigan and pulled out the Holy Grail: Kit’s cell phone. I held on to the arms of my chair to keep myself from knocking her down and taking it from her.

  “You mean about letting us see his phone?” I asked as I began to mentally list all the reasons she should. I watched her eyes dart around the room, considering the issue. “Is it a privacy thing?”

  She looked at me gratefully. “Yeah, I sort of feel like… like I owe him this sort of respect, you know?”

  I nodded and gave her my most sincere “I’m on your side” look. “I do. And I’d feel the same way,” I said, my nose growing. “But I think Kit would want us to get into his cell phone if it meant finding out who killed him, don’t you agree?”

  “Well, we already know who killed him, don’t we?” she asked tentatively. She was a tentative sort of person—I could tell. The kind who was uncomfortable with declarative sentences.

  “Not necessarily,” I said, giving her my most heartfelt “I wish I could tell you the whole story” look. “There are still a lot of questions,” I replied.

  “Oh.”

  I could feel Bailey next to me inwardly gagging, and I knew she was losing patience with this dance. I didn’t blame her, but I sensed that the heavy-handed approach would backfire with this young woman.

  “Would you feel better if we just borrowed it for a little while and only used it to find friends who might know something?” I asked.

  She wrinkled her forehead, then replied, “I think… that might be okay. Like I said, I want to help, I just…”

  “Well, then, that’s what we’ll do,” I said, and held out my hand.

  She reluctantly dropped the phone into it. I was careful not to look triumphant.

  Relieved of the burden of the cell, she pulled out a tissue and dabbed her eyes. “If I’d known it was going to be the last time I ever saw him, I’d have told him how special I thought he was.”

  “How special was he?” I asked.

  She looked at me suspiciously, unsure whether I was making fun of her, but when my expression remained neutral, she relaxed. “He was smart, and he was a dreamer. If he’d had any kind of family support, he’d have been headed for college and maybe an acting career. He was really very handsome.”

  Ms. Wilder sighed, then looked at her watch and said she had to get back to her office. Eager to examine the cell phone that was burning a hole in my jacket pocket, I said my good-byes and thanks to Principal Reilly. It was almost noon, and when we stepped out into the hallway, the rising disharmony of a throng of teenage voices rose up and swelled over us. I looked in the direction it seemed to be coming from, then looked at Bailey.

  “Shall we?” I asked.

  19

  The sound led us to a cafeteria the size of a football field, populated with hundreds of adolescents in the act of grazing through the offerings in the glass-shielded food carts that lined the perimeter of the room. Acned faces, multihued hair, piercings, and tattoos, with a small smattering of those who in my day would’ve been labeled preppies.

  I scanned the crowd for the faces of Kit’s fellow truants, but it was like playing Where’s Waldo? with moving figures. I thought about how to make use of this moment. Then I pulled out the cell phone and powered it up, hoping the battery still had some charge. There wasn’t much, but it was enough for what I had planned. I searched through the dialed numbers. When I’d found the three that recurred the most, I hit the send button for the first one. It was hard to hear over the din, so I watched the room and tried to pick out the movement I was looking for. I didn’t see anything. Bailey shook her head—she hadn’t either. I dialed number two and watched again. This time I saw a ponytailed Asian kid among a group of young males reach for his cell phone. On a hunch, I dialed the third number.

  And got lucky. A black kid with a retro ’fro standing next to the Asian kid pulled out his cell phone. “Yo,” he answered.

  “You missing Kit?” I said.

  I thought I saw his face go slack, though from where I was standing across the room, I couldn’t be sure. I kept the phone to my ear, waiting for an answer as I pointed him out to Bailey. We circled around so we’d come up behind him. As we got closer, I could see he was still holding the phone to his ear, but no words were coming out.

  Finally he asked, “Who is this?”

  By the time I was about ten feet away, I told him, “Turn around.”

  He turned and took one look at Bailey and me, then tugged on the Asian kid’s shirt. They both started to back away. Before they could bolt, I called out, “Don’t do it.” They kept backing slowly, so I added, “I’ve got your names. We can find you whenever we want.”

  The kids close enough to hear us fell silent and watched intently. These students weren’t the kind to
be easily intimidated by authority. If the two boys put up a fight, they’d likely get some support, and this was not the place for us to pull out guns. “We’re not here to bust anyone. We’re here to investigate. Nothing more.”

  The two stopped moving and watched us, and especially Bailey, warily, but they stayed put and let us approach. The other students slowly turned back to their groups, though they continued to dart surreptitious looks at us.

  “You’re Eddie,” I said to the Asian kid, “and you’re Dante,” I said to the black kid. My “gaydar” told me Eddie was on the team, but Dante had the vibe of a straight kid. It wasn’t an obvious thing—they dressed like all the other teenagers milling around us. It was more a matter of the way they stood and moved.

  They wouldn’t commit to their names and looked back at us, impassive. Prove it. Were kids in general that much tougher now? Or just these kids?

  “You ever hear about Kit having something going on with a DA?” I asked.

  That got a reaction. They immediately shook their heads, and Dante asked, “You’re talking about that guy that killed him, right?”

  “Right,” I said, biting back the urge to go on the defensive for Jake. This wasn’t the time. “You ever hear Kit talk about someone named Jake?”

  They again both shook their heads without hesitation.

  “No,” Eddie said.

  “Never,” Dante echoed.

  There was nothing equivocal about the way they’d responded. They really didn’t know—about a prosecutor, or about Jake.

  “You know whether Kit had any ‘regulars’?” The likelihood that they’d share that kind of information with me was slim—assuming they even knew—but what did I have to lose? I watched their reactions carefully. Dante stared off toward the window that faced the street and said nothing, but Eddie slowly shook his head.

  “If he did, he never told me about it,” Eddie replied. Then, in an arch bitchy-queen style, he added, “Probably didn’t want the competition.”

  “That’d be my guess,” I replied.

  Eddie gave me a little smile. I turned to his friend. “Dante?”

  Dante exhaled and shook his head, a small frown wrinkling his brow. “I don’t remember him ever talking about a regular.”

  The answer seemed sincere, so I moved on. “When was the last time you saw Kit?”

  They both shrugged.

  “You don’t remember? Seriously? A friend gets murdered, and you don’t remember the last time you saw him?”

  Dante looked around the cafeteria and Eddie looked out the window, but neither one of them answered my question. I could almost hear them planning their exit. For some reason, they’d both decided they’d done enough cooperating. I could feel Bailey getting ready to step in and be a little more persuasive, but we didn’t have anything to threaten them with—at least not yet. Right now, the smart move was to back off and leave looking like good guys.

  “Whatever you thought of Kit, you know what happened wasn’t right. If you help us, nobody’ll know. I promise we’ll keep it quiet.” Which was true. I had to keep it quiet if I wanted to keep my job. I didn’t feel the need to share that with the boys. I handed them my card and told them to call me, then turned and walked out. Bailey gave them one more hard look and followed.

  I could feel about one hundred pairs of eyes follow us as we left the cafeteria. We walked down the front steps of the school, and I exhaled loudly as we hit the street and headed for Bailey’s car. The sidewalks were still relatively quiet, except for the mom-and-pop grocery and liquor stores, each of which was showing its own particular signs of life. We briskly covered the four blocks to Bailey’s car in silence, lost in our own thoughts. Mine were largely devoted to my decidedly unfond memories of high school. Apparently Bailey’s were too.

  “High school sucks,” she remarked with disgust.

  “My sentiments ex—”

  At that instant—we were just steps from Bailey’s car—the air cracked with the sound of a shot fired at close range.

  “Holy shit!” Bailey said.

  We both hit the ground; I saw a bullet ricochet off the sidewalk ahead of us, spitting up a spray of concrete inches from my face. Another shot nearly split my eardrums, this time even closer. I heard the bullet ping loudly off the fire hydrant just ahead of me.

  Everything seemed to move in slow motion as we each whipped out our guns and simultaneously rolled to shelter behind a parked car. I held my gun out in front of me, though I had no idea where to aim. Ears still ringing from the shots, I quickly scanned the area across the street but saw nothing—unless I counted the freaked-out shoppers who’d jumped out of their skins. A grapefruit and two avocados rolled out of the grocery bag one of them had dropped before running for cover.

  We both rose into a crouch and looked through the car windows, our guns at the ready, but there was nothing to see. Bailey jerked her head in the direction of her car and signaled to me to stay low. No shit, I wanted to say. I bit back the impulse to tell her I thought we should skip. We duckwalked, staying in a crouch to make ourselves smaller targets, and ran for Bailey’s car.

  We crawled in from the passenger side to give us cover. As soon as we were in, Bailey hunched down, gunned the engine, and peeled out. I slid down in my seat and tried to look over the dash to see where the shots might have come from, but as we flew out of there, I realized they could’ve come from too many places—the alley between the gas station and the Korean acupuncturist, a window on the floor above the Armenian grocery store, or behind a myriad assortment of parked vehicles. I gave up and stayed low in my seat as Bailey jerked the car through the streets at a speed that left my stomach several blocks behind us.

  When the adrenaline rush ebbed somewhat, I started to think about who’d done this. It had to be personal. There’d been no gang “hit up”—the usual “Where you from?” that precedes a random gang shooting, and they didn’t usually target women our age anyway. But there was a gang-style brazenness to it, which made it likely that the Sylmar Sevens were behind it. When Bailey had cleared us out of the immediate area and slowed down enough to make conversation a little less life-threatening, I said, “I want to say this was the Sevens.”

  Bailey, who was continually darting looks into the rearview mirror, gave a short nod. “A long way out of their territory.”

  “So’s my hotel. The only way they could’ve known about either place was by following us from the Criminal Courts Building.”

  “True,” Bailey agreed.

  “Though from what I’ve learned, the Sylmar Sevens aren’t exactly a big-time operation. Don’t get me wrong. They’ve done their share. But I’m having a hard time believing Revelo’s important enough to be worth all this work… and risk,” I said.

  Bailey turned right, toward the bridge that would take us over the freeway and into downtown.

  “Not much risk so far. We haven’t caught anybody, right?” she said dryly.

  She had a point. “I suppose it’s possible. Maybe if they merged with a bigger gang, and Revelo’s the new shot-caller…”

  I completed the thought mentally: then the BGs—baby gangsters—of the new and improved Sylmar Sevens would want to impress the new boss and shot-caller by taking out the prosecutor that was causing him trouble. And from their perspective it was a win-win situation: if they didn’t get caught, they’d look like heroes, and if they did get caught, they’d look like even bigger heroes.

  These were not comforting thoughts.

  “If we’re going to call this in, we’d better get back there and do it now,” Bailey said as she continued to drive down Broadway toward the Criminal Courts Building.

  The sound of sirens, distant at first but fast approaching, told me we didn’t have much time to decide.

  20

  It hadn’t been an easy decision. At first I thought that maybe we did have to report the shooting. But upon reflection it occurred to me that in a neighborhood like that, with gangs on all sides, a random shootin
g to claim new turf was a far more logical explanation than the possibility that we were being targeted by the Sylmar Sevens—a small-time gang with limited resources. And the downside of reporting the shooting was that—if I got lucky, at the very least—I’d get a full-time tail, which would effectively end my work on Jake’s case. If I didn’t get so lucky, I’d get busted for sticking my nose into a case I’d specifically been warned off of—a firing offense.

  I told Bailey, “I admit, our chances of solving Jake’s case are probably going to get somewhat slimmer if we’re dead, but if I’m right and this was random, then we’ll have shut ourselves down for no reason.”

  Bailey didn’t like it, but I eventually wheedled her down… on one condition: “You don’t leave the office without me. Ever. You never leave for work before eight a.m.—”

  Fine by me. I’m not exactly nature’s freshest flower before noon anyway…

  “—and when you do walk to the courthouse, you wear a vest.”

  That momentarily cooled my jets. I hate those things with a blinding passion. Stiff, hot, uncomfortable—but worst of all they make you look like Frankenstein. I opened my mouth to protest, but Bailey held up her hand. “Nonnegotiable, Knight.”

  I capitulated.

  But this morning, as I opened my closet doors, I reflected that it was a hell of a day to take my first crack at working a bulletproof. Today I was having lunch with Lieutenant Graden Hales, which meant I had enough wardrobe issues on my hands without worrying about body-armor couture. I don’t have a lot of patience for dress-up, so deciding what to wear usually takes less than three minutes. But now I uncharacteristically found myself noodling over my choice of wardrobe. I didn’t want to look like Dita Von Teese, but I didn’t want to look like Gertrude the Security Guard either. The goal was to seem slick but not slutty. This is not as easy as it seems. My cobalt-blue sweater was flattering but clingy—too slutty. My starchy white blouse with metal cuff links was court worthy but mannish—too blah. Finally I settled on a charcoal-gray cashmere turtleneck thin enough to tuck into a pair of high-waisted wool trousers and finished it off with low-heeled boots—people downtown usually walk to lunch, and I didn’t want to suffer through a multiblock hike on spiky heels. The only thing left to decide was outerwear.