Compelling Evidence

by Steve Martini

  “Your Honor, the people believe that this declaration evidences a state of mind, that flight is seen as a definite alternative to trial in the mind of this defendant. That, coupled with the fact that she faces a possible death sentence, we believe, militates toward a significant increase in bail.” Nelson is trying to pump a little gravity back into the proceedings.

  “And I’ll bet you’ve combed all of your reports and this is the best you could come up with,” I say. “Raul in Rio.” I roll my eyes toward the ceiling. “This evidences nothing but a woman who has exotic dreams of far-off places. Dreams,” I emphasize, “not present intentions to travel.”

  “All right, I’ve heard enough.” Shakers is satisfied that we’re not going to talk ourselves to a compromise, Nelson and I.

  “A three-million-dollar bond is out of the question,” he says. “I won’t consider it. I’ve seen the financial statement of the defendant, and while she has considerable holdings, it is unclear whether these could be posted as surety or given as collateral for a bond. The defendant is entitled to reasonable bail.”

  Talia is looking at me, smiling. I nudge her with my elbow to drop the grin.

  Shakers looks in our direction. “By the same token this is a capital case. While the defendant has no prior record, flight has been known to be perceived as a preferable alternative to death,” he says.

  “Bail is set at one million dollars. There will be a two-percent surcharge for any bond by an underwriter.”

  Talia’s on my sleeve. “I can’t raise that from the house,” she says.

  “This court stands adjourned.” Shakers is off the bench and headed to chambers.

  “We can get a bond,” I say. “It takes only ten percent.” This is the premium to be paid to the bondsman who will post the balance in the form of a surety bond.

  “The equity in the house is at least $200,000—we know that,” I say. “We should be able to get eighty percent of that amount if we can refinance the second.”

  But Talia’s looking at me. She knows the glacierlike speed with which commercial lenders move. She will be in jail for a week, if we’re lucky, and if she can get friends to push the paper along. I don’t even raise the other problems, a guarantor or collateral. The bondsmen don’t give out a million-dollar bond without something held as security—an interest in realty, stocks, your mother, something.

  She looks at me. The matron has her by the arm, nudging Talia toward the door. I have, at least for the moment, defaulted on my promise to get her out of jail.

  “I’ll get you out,” I say.

  “I know you will,” she says.

  It is something in her tone, the inflection of her voice. For the first time I think that perhaps this woman has more confidence in me than I have myself.

  CHAPTER

  21

  HARRY’S in my office at the bookshelf-lined wall using my codes, too cheap to spring for the subscription to keep his own current. Harry’s library is a forest of repealed statutes and outdated law.

  “Where’s Dee?” he asks.

  “Given her the afternoon off,” I say. “I need to do a little reading.” I point to the report on my desk and signal that quiet is appreciated.

  I open the cover. Under the clear acetate is his letterhead:

  SCOTT BOWMAN AND ASSOCIATES LICENSED INVESTIGATORS

  Bowman was my own idea; without a word to Cheetam or Skarpellos, over Talia’s muted objections, I have paid him $2,500 of my own money, a retainer. Halfway through the hearing Talia had finally come to realize that freedom was not likely to follow Cheetam’s performance in the prelim.

  Bowman does only capital cases. His specialty is penalty phase investigations, the background needed to save Talia from the gas chamber should a jury return a guilty verdict.

  While dwelling on the penalty phase may seem macabre at this stage, Bowman has recommended an early start. His advice makes sense. Little things known about Talia’s background now might be woven into our defense, a little preconditioning for mercy if the jury convicts.

  Talia had a hard time with this, two lengthy interviews alone with Bowman at his office. Her early life, it seems, is something she would rather forget.

  As I read this first preliminary report—Bowman will do a follow-up investigation contacting family and friends for more information—I am struck by just how little I know of Talia’s background. In the first five pages I learn more concerning her life and what motivates her than I gleaned during the months of our relationship.

  Talia is part Latina, something she has covered over with Anglicized ways—mastered, it would appear, at some cost to her own identity.

  Conscious life for Talia Griggs began during a Monterey Park summer, her first memories coming from age five. She lived with her mother, Carmen, two brothers and a sister in the trackless waste of nondescript duplexes and squalid five-room frame houses that the contractors charitably dubbed “ranch homes.” These structures now litter the east end of Los Angeles County like some sorry architectural bivouac.

  As a teenager growing up in the more affluent section of the county, I had seen it—a place where the houses were dominated by dead lawns and broken window screens. Long-abandoned vehicles littered every residential street, resting on bricks or blocks of wood, the fantasy of would-be mechanics caught in the perpetual illusion of one day returning the wrecks to the highway. The houses bake under an oppressive sun that is for months not visible through the perennial brown haze that hovers like some clouded cornea over the inland areas of the county. And always there are the children, in disproportionate numbers scampering about the streets and sidewalks playing with toys that match the houses in their state of disrepair.

  It is in such a setting that, from Bowman’s report, I can now visualize Talia, streams of oily brown hair curling at the shoulders, dirty-faced, running to keep up with the boys. For an instant, visions of Sarah flood my mind between the lines of his narrative, for their features and coloring, Talia’s and my daughter’s, are not dissimilar.

  Carmen Garcia, Talia’s mother, was never entirely certain of her daughter’s paternal bloodline. Apparently after some calculation and by process of elimination she settled on the putative father. James Griggs, an itinerant truck driver, had followed Carmen home from one of her habitual nightly haunts to share her bed during a cold winter night and had remained a tenant in her home for a week while his truck had undergone repairs. Carmen had Griggs’s name added to Talia’s birth certificate when the little girl reached age two. According to Talia this was more an act of bureaucratic expedience than concern for pedigree. It gave the county authorities someone to pursue for contribution toward the AFDC benefits that Carmen received monthly from the welfare department for support of her daughter.

  It appears that this was an idle act, for Mr. Griggs was never seen again, and but for his brief, and questionable, genetic contribution he never entered little Talia’s life.

  Through childhood and early adolescence, Talia learned to live with the constant stream of male friends who wandered through her mother’s life like tattooed vagabonds in search of some sexual holy grail.

  I sit back in my chair, and in my mind’s eye I can visualize a small child kneeling on the living room floor of that littered house, wide-eyed and precocious, as a procession of strangers wandered through the place in pursuit of her mother.

  The household of Talia’s early childhood, it seems, was governed by two unfaltering doctrines. Rule number one, her mother did not suffer from an alcohol problem, and rule number two, the children did not talk to others about their mother’s problem. The seeming lack of logical consistency between these two precepts apparently eluded their young minds, or else the fear of retribution was so great as to render reason impotent. More than anything else was the sense of misplaced loyalty shared by all of the children toward a mother who had shown little sensitivity or love.

  By the time Talia reached age twelve, Carmen’s problems with alcohol had reached into
lerable proportions. Most of her days were spent in an intoxicated stupor. Talia noticed that the attention of male friends toward her mother had begun to wane. There were fewer such visits and the men were older, and the situation appeared more desperate. Increasingly, if they stayed for more than a single night, their attention turned from Carmen to her daughter.

  Given her nearly constant state of inebriation, Carmen did not notice these advances toward Talia until a few months later, when Talia, her body taking on the rounded curves of womanhood, was cornered alone in the house by one of her mother’s male friends. Carmen walked in, unexpected and surprisingly sober, to find Talia half naked, her clothes torn, huddled under the sheets, struggling with one of Carmen’s former bed mates.

  According to Talia and as related by Bowman, the mother’s reaction was instantaneous and unbridled, a display of rage that marked the girl’s memory for life—and directed exclusively at young Talia. Lamps were thrown, sheets ripped, nightstands upended. The girl lay frozen in terror on the bed, protecting herself as best she could behind two pillows as her mother flung any object within reach at the child. Talia’s male assailant, completely ignored in this melee, quietly slipped from the room, pulling up and buckling his pants as he hopped down the front drive toward his car.

  For weeks after this incident Carmen would speak to her daughter only to remind her of her disloyalty, her sinfulness. She told her of the price paid by wayward children. Carmen carted Talia off to the local Catholic church, a place never darkened by Carmen’s own shadow before that day, and compelled the teenager to confess her sin to an aging priest huddled behind the plastic shield of the confessional. In Talia’s own words, the episode left an indelible scar on her, a sense that all of society’s institutions were flawed by the same hypocrisy demonstrated by her mother.

  In the weeks and months that followed, Carmen’s behavior grew only worse. She would carouse until the early hours of the morning, sleeping in to ward off the effects of the previous night’s drunk, and then awaken to the headed hoof beats of a hangover alone in an empty bed. To read Talia’s narrative as related to Bowman, her mother’s mornings always started the same way, in a halo of cigarette smoke, to a chorus of tobacco-induced coughing spasms. Until one morning she clutched her chest during one of these coughing jags and keeled over, dead.

  I close the cover on the report, leaving the next section, “Adolescence and Adulthood,” for a later time.

  “Interesting reading?” says Harry. He’s standing on one of my chairs reading a book he pulled from the top shelf.

  In ten pages Bowman has shredded the image of Talia as the ultimate spoiled rich bitch.

  The surprise here is not so much the manner of her early life, as the fact that she has concealed it so completely from those with whom she has been so intimate.

  CHAPTER

  22

  “I knew it,” she says. “I knew this would happen.” Nikki is I seething.

  I’ve come to her over dinner, my invitation, at Zeek’s, to get her signature. The house is in joint tenancy, and I need Nikki’s name on the line for a loan, money to finance Talia’s case. More and more often, I get flashbacks of the morning I witnessed Brian Danley’s execution, but in my mind’s eye it is Talia’s face I see looking out at me from inside the death chamber. It is the only thing that drives me to ask for Nikki’s help.

  I’ve selected this place carefully; it is crowded but subdued, like eating in a church. The waiters are all wearing vestments, starched white linen with colored broadcloth around their middle like cummerbunds. The melodic sound of a balalaika drifts from the next room, where a man in classic Russian garb plays to a table of patrons.

  But I am not certain that even the serene ambience of this place will quell Nikki’s rage. Beads of perspiration the size of raindrops trickle under my shirt. Courage sits in front of me in a glass tumbler, Johnnie Walker, a double on the rocks.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a drink?” I ask her.

  “You’ve got gall to ask,” she says. But Nikki’s not talking about a cocktail. She’s piping me aboard the good ship wrath, for a cruise in heavy seas. She’s pissed that I can even ask for her release on the house. Her right hand claws the linen tablecloth at the side of her plate. Her piercing gray eyes are penetrating my soul.

  “I suppose she’s asked you to do this?”

  The “she” in Nikki’s question is Talia, but I play obtuse.

  “Who?” I am innocence, with questioning eyes.

  “The bitch—the bimbo—your client.” She drops these like napalm between clenched teeth.

  An older woman in a fox stole, molting tails locked in needle-sharp teeth about her shoulders, is now looking at us from the next table.

  “No,” I say. “Nobody asked me to do this. I’m doing it because it’s good business. The case is worth some money.”

  “Well excuse me, Lee Iacocca,” she says. She pauses for a moment to pick up her fork, to play with her salad. “What if I say no?”

  This is not what I want to hear.

  “I can’t refinance without your signature.”

  “Ah.” The answer she wanted. “Well, then, you can’t have it.”

  Now she is eating, enjoying her salad. Like this little bit of spite was just the seasoning it needed.

  I explain that I will advance the costs of defense, but in doing so, I will take a note secured by Talia’s interest in the firm. “This isn’t personal, Nikki, it’s business,” I tell her.

  “Business? Well, that covers a multitude of sins, doesn’t it.”

  “You think I lied to you”—my tone is level and low—“that I deceived you when I got into the case. I told you I was invited in. That was true. I didn’t ask for it. I said I wasn’t lead counsel. I wasn’t. Everything I told you was true.”

  I play upon Cheetam as the disaster, as if Nikki cares. “He’s pulled out—thank God,” I say. “But now I’ve got more into the case than anyone else. It would take another lawyer six months to come up to speed.”

  “I see. Nobody else can do it like you. I suppose she’s counting on you too.”

  “I suppose,” I say. “Like any other client faced with the gas chamber.”

  This puts a sober expression on Nikki’s face. She has never considered the stakes before. Even in her current state of spite, death by cyanide gas is wholly disproportionate to her sense of revenge.

  “Listen,” I say, “you don’t want to help out, I understand. I’ll just have to get it someplace else.” I’m chumming the waters now.

  This thing with Talia is hard on Nikki. I would not do it if I had any other choice. She sees this, my plea for money to defend a former lover, as if I am purposefully pouring salt into an open wound—rubbing her nose in my earlier affair.

  There’s a long, painful pause, awkward for Nikki as she shifts gears a little. “How much would you need,” she asks, “for this defense of yours?”

  “A hundred—maybe seventy-five thousand if I watch it. It would carry the defense to the end of the case.” I tell her that Harry and I are taking only partial fees until it’s over.

  The truth is, I haven’t talked to Harry about this. I figure I’ll catch him with his head in a bottle one night and get an ironclad commitment that he’ll be my Keenan counsel.

  “I can collect the balance when it’s over, out of the partnership interest. I’ll pay off the second. Believe me,” I say, “I’ll take a premium on the case.”

  “You’ll take a premium?”

  “I will.”

  “And you think that makes a difference to me? You bring me here, to this place.” Her arms are rising in a gesture to the surroundings, along with the volume of her voice. Hairy little beasts are bristling at me again, from around the neck pocked with age spots. Its owner is turning to look at Nikki.

  My eyes are pleading with her: “Not so loud.”

  “You take me here to this cavern of intrigue.” She is dripping with sarcasm. “You bring me here not
to talk about us, about our situation, but to discuss—business.” She makes it sound like a bad word, like it ought to have four letters.

  “That wasn’t the only reason. I wanted to talk about us too.”

  “Yes, but first things first, huh?”

  I’m only digging myself in deeper.

  “Did you ever bring her here?” she asks.

  I wonder whether to play stupid one more time, to give her a quick “Who?” at least for appearances. I look at the little foxes and think better of it.

  “No,” I say.

  “That’s something, I suppose.”

  I’m chugging Johnnie Walker now and flagging the waitress for more.

  “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” she says. “It’s all you ever discussed through eleven years of marriage, your career, your business.” There it is, the “B-word” again, bursting from her lips like a little bomb. “It’s all that ever mattered.”

  “It’s not true, Nikki. You mattered, Sarah mattered. But somewhere we got off the track.” I am never good at this. This verbal intimacy that women seem to get off on.

  I consider for a moment offering her money, a return on her investment in the house, from my take in the case. But I am afraid that she will be offended. I try putting a face on it.

  “We will treat my earnings from this case as community property. It’s only fair. We’re using community property to finance the case, our joint interest in the house.”

  “Ever the lawyer,” she says. “It’s always another deal. If you were half the husband you are a lawyer we’d be living together. Hell, we’d be in love.”

  Nikki has a way of capturing the truth and dumping it on your head like a pail of Arctic Ocean water.

  There’s a long, sober silence while she pokes around her salad with her fork. Then she looks up at me. “I won’t take any money. If you want my signature, I will give it to you—because you want it,” she says, “and for no other reason than that.”

  I sit there looking at her, the shame written in my eyes. I have gotten what I have come for, but she has taken everything else—a large measure of self-respect.