Interest of Justice

by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

  “Leo,” she gasped, completely startled. “I thought you were ill.”

  “I was,” he said, taking a seat in front of her desk. “I came in after lunch. I’ve been fighting this flu for a month now. I think the whole courthouse has it.”

  Lara walked backward to her desk. She felt safer there. Her heart was racing. She couldn’t stop herself from staring. This man, she thought, her whole body trembling, could be the person responsible for her sister’s death. Here he was—only a few feet away, in the same room, breathing the same air.

  She forced herself to sit down and started moving papers around. “Uh, what can I do for you?” she finally said.

  “I heard you were attacked yesterday. Terrible…bad business.” He was shaking his head, not looking up. “You shouldn’t stay late and go to your car alone. I know you do that a lot.”

  She didn’t say anything. What could she say? Someone had let Frank Door into the underground garage. A person could crawl through the gates, but Frank Door had managed to get a car down there. For that he needed a connection. That connection might be sitting comfortably in a chair right in front of her.

  He continued, “Something else has come up. I really hate to even mention it to you after what you’ve gone through, but I feel I must. Are you dating Benjamin England?”

  Lara tried to read his eyes. They were expressionless—dark, watery pools that went nowhere. Her hands were trembling. She placed them in her lap so he would not see. She couldn’t bear for him to know that she was frightened. Even in her lap, her fingers were dancing and fluttering. One foot started tapping involuntarily, and she held her knee with her hands. He was waiting for her to answer. His question had disappeared from her mind. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”

  “England…have you been dating Benjamin England?”

  “I’ve had a few dates with him,” she said. “What’s this about?”

  “Oh,” he said, pausing for a long time, breathing heavily. “I-I was hoping it wasn’t true. The D.A. is filing a grievance. They heard you were dating England and believe you were prejudicial in your ruling of the Henderson matter.”

  Lara slapped back in her chair so hard that she slid across the plastic mat and had to use her heels to bring herself back to the desk. Then she couldn’t contain herself and exploded, the tension racing from her stomach to her mouth. “That’s insane. First, I wasn’t even dating England at the time of the Henderson ruling. I would never date a defense attorney on a case I was hearing. Second, I would have made that ruling even if I’d been sleeping with the damn D.A.”

  “I see,” Evergreen said, letting his mouth fall open and remain that way. Finally he closed it and said, “Relax, Lara. This is the type of thing you must deal with when you’re on the bench. You have to watch every step you make. I’ve tried to tell you that ever since your appointment.”

  Lara’s eyes were blazing, but she didn’t speak. Perspiration was popping out on her brow, her upper lip, trickling down between her breasts.

  “They want the ruling overturned and the matter brought back before the court,” Evergreen continued. “I may have to oblige them. Are you lovers?”

  Lara spun her chair around to the wall. This couldn’t go on. She picked up a paperweight and held it in her hands, thinking in another second she was going to hurl it at him. “I don’t think I care to continue this conversation any longer, Leo,” she said in a firm, flat voice, one she hardly recognized as her own. “Whether England and I are lovers or not is no one’s business but mine. I repeat, I wasn’t dating him at the time of the Henderson ruling. We started going out a week or so after. I’m no longer seeing him. If they want to open up a full-scale investigation, then so be it.”

  She didn’t turn around until Evergreen was almost out the door. Then she slammed the paperweight down on her desk as hard as she could, and the older man glanced back at her before stepping through the door.

  Tears were gathering in her eyes. She’d felt so strong earlier, so self-assured. Now she was shaken, enraged. Everywhere she turned, everything she did was now suspect. Somehow she had gone from being a respected professional to teetering on the edge of losing it all. She grabbed her purse and stood to leave, glancing around at her chambers, wondering if she’d be here much longer. There was only one good thing about it.

  Right now she didn’t really care.

  The traffic was light and the condo close. Lara rushed back and jumped in the shower. When she got out, she stood there naked and studied her reflection in the mirror. She didn’t really have a bad body. She was slender and her breasts had yet to start drooping. They would. She knew that. It was all just a matter of time. She turned around and looked at her backside. That would be drooping too before she knew it. Taking out all her makeup, she dumped it on the countertop and started painting. Tonight she wanted to look good. She wanted to look pretty and feminine. What she really wanted was to look like Ivory, but that was impossible. Sometimes she thought Josh’s resentment stemmed from the fact that she did resemble his mother. He looked at her and maybe got angry—that she was alive and his mother was dead.

  As she applied blush to her cheekbones, she stared into her own eyes. “You’re going to sleep with him,” she said.

  Rickerson made her temperature rise, her pulse quicken. She darkened her eyebrows and then tossed the pencil onto the counter. Her sudden attack of vanity, the man constantly in her thoughts—she knew it was going to happen. She resigned herself to it. So he was married. She didn’t want to wreck his home or steal him away from his wife. She certainly didn’t aspire to marry him. She just wanted to borrow him for one night, one day, a few stolen hours. Was that so despicable? After everything she’d been through, didn’t she deserve a few minutes of pleasure?

  “Yes,” she said out loud, “you’re despicable.” She didn’t know when it would happen, but she knew she was willing.

  “What will one little tryst with a cop do?” she asked her mirror image. “They’re ready to fry me. Might as well go out in a puff of smoke.”

  “I want that gun,” she told Rickerson in the car. When he’d walked through the door, he’d looked quite dapper. He was wearing a nicely tailored rust-colored sports jacket that flattered him considerably and looked great with his red hair.

  “No problem,” he told her, reaching down where he had the gun strapped to his leg with a few pieces of leather. He handed her a small-caliber pistol, the same one he had tried to give her before. “Be careful. It’s loaded. It’s my spare.”

  Lara turned it over in her hands, feeling how light it was. Such a small thing, she thought, wondering how much it weighed. But this little item was enough to end someone’s life in a matter of seconds. It was amazing. She opened her purse and dropped it inside. They were stalled in traffic headed into Los Angeles. The concert began at eight.

  “Rodriguez is a pretty straight shooter,” she told him. “If you’re a Hispanic judge in Orange County, you’ve got to be. I think he’ll sign a warrant when we put everything together. I don’t think he’d hesitate for a minute if the evidence is substantial.”

  “Sounds good,” Rickerson said, a smug expression on his face. “Is that all you’ve got for today?”

  “Guess so,” she said. She’d already told him about the court order, the fact that someone had issued it from her own terminal. And she’d told him about her conversation with Evergreen just before she’d left for the day. “I was really excited. I thought you would be too.” She was disappointed. What she’d told him didn’t seem to impress him at all. Getting a judge to cooperate would be a big accomplishment.

  “Oh, I’m excited, lady. Let me tell you, I’m fucking about to piss in my pants.”

  She turned and leaned forward, bracing herself against the dash. “You look like the cat that swallowed the canary. Want to share it with me?”

  He slapped the steering wheel. “We got lucky. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this a week ago, but I didn’t. Jo
sh identified Packy Cummings. Picked him right out of a photo lineup.”

  “No…really? How? He said he didn’t see anything that day.”

  “That’s because he didn’t know what he was seeing. Evidently, he saw Cummings’s face in a car coming down that hill. Every day he stopped and took a breather before going up. Packy was flying, speeding, burning up the roads. And guys like Josh love Camaros. They’re hot cars, and a red one—not a teenage boy around isn’t gonna take note. He looked, but of course he had no reason to remember. After he got to the house and saw the bodies, he forgot all about the man in the car. But today he remembered.”

  Lara put her hands together like she was praying and looked at the top of the car. “Thank you, God,” she said dramatically. “I didn’t think You were there, but I guess I was wrong.” She then turned to Rickerson. “More, tell me more. This is better than sex.”

  “He might have seen him loitering around your street, over at the McDonald’s. From what he said, it was around the time Cummings was shot. He said he saw a man on the phone and recalled seeing him somewhere before, but he couldn’t remember where.”

  “Now he’s made,” Lara said. “Right?”

  “Right, kid. Now he’s made. If Evergreen talked you into letting Cummings out O.R., which he did, then there’s the connection we’ve been looking for. Not only that, but forensics put the finishing touches on it this evening. The skin samples found under your sister’s fingernails came from Packy Cummings, and the semen sample is a match.”

  Rickerson saw an opening in the traffic and stomped on the accelerator. Then the line of cars braked. Not wanting to wait, he raced down the off ramp and then headed back up the on ramp. For the remainder of the drive, he repeated this technique, by-passing the traffic.

  “Do we have enough for an arrest?” she asked, her spirits soaring, about to go right through the roof of the car into the stratosphere.

  “Hey, you’re the judge.”

  “What about Phillip?”

  “Bradshaw says he looks clean. He did make two loans. One for ten grand a few months ago and a recent one for fifteen. We didn’t match his phone number to any on the list. I think that rules Phillip out.”

  “I’m not so sure about that, Ted. He might have an apartment somewhere. Maybe he simply lists his mother’s address on his employment records. A lot of people do that—young people who move from apartment to apartment.

  “Lara, he made loans totaling twenty-five grand. Where’d he get the other fifteen? We found forty thousand in the safe, remember?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Borrowed it from his mother.”

  Rickerson rolled his eyes around, giving Lara a look that said let it go. Before she could stop herself, she broke out laughing. Just being here with him, all dressed up and on their way to a concert, made Lara feel giddy.

  “Does Josh get the forty grand?” she asked. “I mean, I could use it for his education. The killer’s certainly not going to come back and claim his money.”

  Rickerson smiled at her. “I think you’re right. I didn’t give it any thought. Do you think we have enough for an arrest warrant for Evergreen?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I say we do. I think we can go to Rodriguez in the morning unless you think we should wait until you trace the game man’s phone number. I thought you were going to do that today.”

  “I let baby Bradshaw—you know, the chief’s son—handle it and as usual, he fucked it up, had them trace the wrong number. Before I knew it, it was too late. We have the address, an apartment, for this Tommy Black, but we can’t get in without a search warrant. I’m sure that’s where the phone number will come back to—that apartment.”

  Lara sat back and closed her eyes. Rickerson was silent. Then she felt something. He had let his hand drift across the seat to hers and was lightly touching her fingers with his own. She didn’t move; she didn’t open her eyes. She relished the contact, the exchange of energy. She felt a rush of affection for this man. It wasn’t even physical desire. It was real: genuine emotion and admiration. He was strong but sensitive. He had old-fashioned values. He was the kind of man who would make a great father for Josh. She stopped herself. She could reconcile her conscience to a brief affair. The way she was thinking now was completely off base. He had two kids, for God’s sake. As if he could read her thoughts, the hand disappeared and the moment was gone. Rickerson steered the car into the parking lot of the concert hall and parked.

  “This is it, kid,” he told her, explaining his theory that Evergreen had molested his own son. Then he told her what he planned to do. “After the concert we’ll go backstage. Watch the section he’s in and see if you can spot him. We’ll tell him something. I don’t know. That we’re music critics and we want to interview him. How does that sound?”

  “I don’t know a thing about music, Ted,” Lara said. For a moment she leaned against the car, her bruised side throbbing from the long drive down. “I don’t know if I can pull something like that off. Can’t we think of something else? And why would he tell a music critic or a reporter that his father molested him? That’s absurd.”

  It was dusk and people were walking past them, heading to the doors of the concert hall. Lara caught whiffs of cologne and men’s aftershave. Rickerson joined her, standing right next to her and taking out a pack of gum. He offered it to Lara, but she waved it away. She sniffed. Even the detective smelled good. He was actually wearing cologne. And he wasn’t smoking a cigar.

  “You look really pretty tonight, Lara,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look this pretty.”

  She smiled. It was the makeup. She’d have to start wearing it every day. “I didn’t really have much to wear at the condo,” she said, looking down at her modest black jersey dress.

  “I like it,” he said. He glanced at her legs. Then his eyes rose to her chest. The dress was snug. It made her look more shapely than she really was.

  She turned and touched his jacket, running her fingers along the lapels. “Nice jacket.”

  “You like, huh?”

  “I like you,” she said. As soon as she had said it, she wanted to take it back. She started walking across the parking lot to the concert hall. In seconds, he was next to her and another moment had vanished. “Go over again what we’re going to do?”

  “Look,” he said. “We’ll tell him this story—the music critics thing, get him to go for coffee with us, and then tell him another story. You plead and beg. Don’t tell him about your sister. Make up another story about how your son was molested by his father. You know, something like that. Got it?”

  “Got it,” she said. “Hope this works.”

  Lara spotted Evergreen’s son immediately. She had seen his picture on Evergreen’s desk many times. She actually enjoyed the concert, sitting next to Rickerson, their thighs touching, everyone around them seeing them as a couple. On several occasions during the concert, he turned and just stared at her. She kept waiting for him to say something, but he never got the words out of his mouth. Once he picked up her hand and actually put it in his lap. She chickened out and pulled it away. She didn’t even think he was aware that he had done it. Maybe he held his wife’s hand like that, she thought. That was enough to put a damper on her feelings.

  As soon as the concert was over, they scooted backstage. “Robert Evergreen,” Rickerson said, pumping his hand. “This is my associate Shirley Brown. We’re with Music Today. Can you give us a minute?”

  He was in his early twenties, and it was obvious that he was painfully shy. Not once did he look either of them in the eye. “Music…World?” he stuttered. “I’ve never heard of that. Is it a magazine?”

  “Yes, a new magazine. We want you for our first edition…want to do an interview. You were outstanding tonight. Tremendous performance. Inspired, actually. Didn’t you think so, Shirley?”

  The young man didn’t speak. He shuffled his feet around and gripped his instrument in his right hand. “I-I don’t think so,
” he finally said, his voice so low they had to strain to hear it. “Please, excuse me,”

  “Wait,” Rickerson said, touching the sleeve of his tuxedo. “Come on, give us a chance. We’re a new magazine. We need the interview. Hey, it will advance your career.”

  The young man took a few steps forward and then stopped. Rickerson was blocking his way. “What do I have to do?”

  “Great,” Rickerson exclaimed loudly, turning to Lara. “Isn’t this great? We’re going to get an interview with Robert Evergreen. Boy, the boss will be impressed.” He turned back to the man. “All you have to do is go and have a cup of coffee with us. We ask you a few questions and that’s it. Then you’re immortal—in print. Your father will be thrilled.”

  There it was. Both of them saw it. The moment they mentioned his father, he completely froze and all the blood vanished from his face.

  “What…are you talking about? Do you know my father? Did he arrange this?”

  “We’ve heard of him, of course. He’s an important man. I know he’d be pleased.”

  “I have to go,” he said and again tried to walk away.

  “Please,” Rickerson said, looking for Lara for help.

  “Yes,” she said. “Please, they hired me on a trial basis. If I don’t get an interview tonight, I could lose my job.”

  His eyelids fluttered and he finally looked up. “All right, give me a minute.”

  “No problem,” Rickerson said. “We’ll wait right here.”

  The man vanished into the crowd of musicians, and Rickerson took out another stick of gum. “Quiet, nervous man, huh?”

  “Yes,” Lara said. “Too quiet. You might just be right about Evergreen molesting him. He fits the profile.”

  They waited. Ten minutes turned into twenty. The lights went off on the stage, and most of the musicians had filed past them, exiting through the rear doors. “Think he went to take a piss and fell in?” Rickerson said. Then he stopped one of the musicians. “There’s not a another door around here is there?”