The 37th Amendment: A Novel

by Shelley, Susan

  “Thanks,” Ted said. He sat down. “I have new information on the Maria Sanders case.”

  Gonzales frowned. “The Maria Sanders case?” he said skeptically. “That’s closed.”

  “I know it is,” Ted said. “But what if you saw something that proved Robert Rand was innocent?”

  Gonzales’ frown deepened.

  Ted opened his briefcase and pulled out Brianna’s disk, the printout of the police sketch and the thick stack of spreadsheets listing all the showings of promos for Power Play. “May I show you this?” he asked.

  Carl Gonzales was silent.

  Ted put the papers on the chair next to him and held up the disk. “You have to see this,” he said.

  “All right,” Gonzales growled. “What is it?”

  Ted told him. Gonzales’ frown returned, but he took the disk and slid it into the player next to his computer monitor. The screen went black, then the red slicing effect slid across the screen followed by the announcer’s thundering voice. Gonzales turned the volume down.

  “In one second,” Ted said, “I’m going to ask you to freeze the frame.” The image of the girl with the gun shattered and suddenly Robert Rand was standing there, in the alley, with the baseball bat. “Right there,” he said, “Pause it.”

  Gonzales touched a button on his keyboard and looked at the screen. “What about it?” he asked.

  Ted grabbed the folded police sketch from the chair. “Look at this,” he said. “It’s a total coincidence. Robert Rand looks just like the guy in this sketch.”

  Gonzales looked at Ted as if to say, “And?”

  “It’s a complete case of mistaken identity,” Ted said. “The witness obviously recognized Robert Rand from seeing this promo. Look, it ran day and night for nearly a week before he was arrested.” Ted picked up the stack of spreadsheets and showed Gonzales the dense columns of single-spaced listings.

  “All right, Mr. Braden, let me understand this,” Gonzales said. “You are bringing me evidence that Robert Rand matched the description of the killer. Are you trying to tell me this should have exonerated him?”

  “I’m trying to tell you that you convicted an innocent man.”

  “No,” Gonzales said, his voice flat. “Mr. Rand’s accomplice testified against him. The jury did not believe Mr. Rand’s testimony or his alibi. I understand, he was a friend of yours and this must be very difficult for you. I’m sorry.”

  Ted was dumbstruck.

  Gonzales ejected the disk and handed it back to Ted. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  Two minutes later, Ted was standing in front of the elevator, juggling his briefcase and his spreadsheets. He reached out to press the down button and the stack of spreadsheets slipped through his arms and fell to the floor. Scowling, Ted set his briefcase down and began to reassemble the splayed pages. Suddenly a scent like evening jasmine rippled the air. When Ted looked up, Jordan Rainsborough was standing over him.

  She was wearing a sapphire blue silk business suit but it might as well have been an evening gown. The deep color illuminated her blue eyes and the fabric’s subtle shimmer seemed to focus the room’s light on her curves. Ted was mesmerized.

  Jordan looked down at Ted’s stunned face with an amused twinkle. “Sure, you think that,” she said playfully, “but you won’t call.” She reached out and pressed the down button for the elevator.

  Ted felt his jaw drop. He thought he couldn’t have heard right. “I’ll call,” he said. “I didn’t think prosecutors went out with witnesses.”

  The twinkle in Jordan’s eyes went blank for a moment, and then a flicker of recognition replaced it. Ted, still on the floor and eye-level to Jordan’s close-fitting silk skirt, did not notice the change in her expression.

  “Let me help you with that,” Jordan said, bending her knees gracefully to reach the papers on the floor. “What brings you back to the Criminal Courts building, Mr. Braden?”

  “I was here to see Carl Gonzales,” Ted answered.

  Jordan looked alarmed. “What about?” she asked.

  Ted grabbed the last of the scattered pages and stood up. “About Robert Rand,” he said. “He was innocent. This is the proof.” He pointed with his chin to the stack of spreadsheets. “I told the God’s honest truth in that courtroom, even if you did manage to persuade the jury that I’m a liar.”

  Jordan looked at the floor. “I was just doing my job,” she said. “It was nothing personal.” Her eyes darted to the spreadsheets Ted now held in a tight grip against the right side of his chest. “What is all that stuff?” she asked.

  Ted started to explain about Robert Rand’s appearance in the commercials for the TV movie, and the ding of the elevator arriving interrupted him.

  “I was just going out for a pizza,” Jordan said. “Would you like to join me?” She smiled at him.

  Ted nodded.

  Jordan had walked to work, so they rode the elevator down to parking level 5 where Ted had left the Corvette parked in a fire lane.

  “You parked illegally in the Criminal Courts building?” Jordan asked.

  Ted removed a citation from under his windshield wiper, slipped it into his pocket, and smiled. “I’d rather have the ticket than the door ding,” he said.

  “It is a gorgeous car,” Jordan agreed.

  Ted stayed out of the tunnels, fighting the surface street traffic on Vermont all the way up to Los Feliz Boulevard, where Jordan said there was a great Italian restaurant called Ceretti’s. That was fine with Ted. He didn’t want to run into anyone he knew, either.

  Following Jordan’s directions, Ted turned right on Los Feliz Boulevard and then left into a narrow driveway that led past the restaurant to a hillside parking lot behind the building. He shook his head when the valet approached his door. “I’ll park the car,” he said, pressing a bill into the teenager’s palm.

  Ceretti’s was an almost comically traditional Italian restaurant, with wooden chairs, white tablecloths and dusty plastic grapes hanging from lattices on the ceiling. Pastel murals of Italian street scenes decorated the walls. The host brought Jordan and Ted to a table for four in front of a painting of a fountain. Ted held a chair for Jordan, a gesture that brought surprised expressions from both Jordan and the host, and then took a seat across from her. He placed his briefcase and the stack of spreadsheets on the chair next to him.

  “So tell me,” Jordan said, her tone as businesslike as if they were in her office, “What did you tell Gonzales?”

  Ted went through all the details for her. He showed her the spreadsheets, nearly starting a fire as the wide pages came to rest on top of a red glass candle. Jordan picked up a small vase of flowers and poured some water into the candle to douse the flame.

  “And you told Gonzales all this?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said it wasn’t enough. Not against the testimony of that heroin dealer who claimed to be Rand’s accomplice.”

  Jordan was silent, staring into her water glass. Finally she looked up. “I think I’d like a glass of wine,” she said. “How about you?”

  A glass of Viognier brought a pink blush to Jordan’s cheeks. Ted couldn’t take his eyes off her. He twirled his fork idly in the plate of linguini that was in front of him.

  “Can you keep a secret?” Jordan asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “I mean it. If I tell you something in absolute confidence, will it stay just between us, and never go any further?”

  “Sure,” Ted answered. He couldn’t imagine ever saying no to her. He considered himself fortunate that she hadn’t asked him to kill somebody.

  “Okay,” Jordan began, leaning forward. “About that heroin dealer, Bara Salvacion. Gonzales knew she was lying. We all knew she was lying. Well, that’s not completely fair. We didn’t absolutely know she was lying. But we knew she’d lied before under similar circumstances. We had the file. And under the letter of the law, we were obligated to turn that file over to t
he defense. And we didn’t.”

  Ted was wide-eyed. Jordan reached for her wine glass and leaned back again.

  “Why not?” Ted asked finally.

  “Why do you think?” Jordan said, leaning forward again. “So we could convict the vicious murderer who killed Maria Sanders and Officer Szafara. So we could get him off the streets. So he would never kill again. Robert Rand was picked out of a lineup. We all thought he was guilty. We’re not evil.”

  Ted was silent for a moment. “I wish you hadn’t asked me to keep that secret,” he said.

  “You have to keep it secret,” Jordan whispered. “You promised.”

  Ted nodded. “All right,” he said, “But you have to do something for me.”

  Now Jordan was wide-eyed.

  “An innocent man has been killed,” Ted said. “He deserves to have his name cleared. His family deserves that.”

  “They deserve that and a huge settlement,” Jordan agreed.

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

  Jordan thought for a moment. She shrugged.

  “Why don’t you make the file public?” Ted demanded.

  “What file, the file on Bara Salvacion? I can’t, it’s a confidential record. I’d go to prison.”

  Ted was startled. “Prison?” he asked.

  “You bet,” Jordan said. “Fifteen years per count. Mandatory sentencing. The Confidentiality of Records Act of 2012.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ted said. “Didn’t you just say you were supposed to give the file to Robert Rand’s defense lawyers?”

  Jordan nodded. “The prosecutors are required, upon finding evidence that might tend to exonerate a defendant, to turn it over to the defense lawyers,” she explained. “But since the file wasn’t officially determined to be evidence, it wasn’t turned over, and it didn’t become part of the record of the trial. So it’s still confidential.”

  “Who made the decision not to turn over the file?”

  “Well,” Jordan said, “I suppose if there were an investigation, it would find that the lead prosecutor, Merritt Logan, is the person whose fingerprints are on that decision. Gonzales’ hands will be clean. They’re always clean.”

  “You don’t get along with him very well, do you?”

  “Who, Gonzales?”

  “No,” Ted said, “Logan.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, exactly. It’s just that Carl Gonzales is going to retire next year and only one of us can be appointed to replace him.”

  “I see,” Ted said. “You want to sabotage him, but you don’t want to be caught at it.”

  Jordan said nothing.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? You want the world to know that Merritt Logan concealed information that might have caused the jury to acquit Robert Rand.”

  Jordan’s blue eyes, dusky in the candlelight, narrowed slightly. “Well,” she said, “Don’t you?”

  Ted watched the light glint in Jordan’s eyes for a moment before he answered. “I tried to convince at least a dozen reporters that Robert Rand was innocent,” he said. “Everybody I talked to said my evidence didn’t stack up against the testimony of Rand’s accomplice. You’ve got a file that says she’s a liar. You give me that file, I guarantee they’ll all do the story.”

  “I can’t do that,” Jordan said.

  “Can’t you make a copy? Can’t you leak it to somebody?”

  “There’s no way.” Jordan shook her head. “Every file in the D.A.’s office is encrypted and password-protected. The only way to get access to those documents is to log in with your ID and security code, and your password. That generates a record of who sees what. If one word of that file got into the press, it wouldn’t take five minutes for them to trace it to me.”

  “And you’d go to prison for fifteen years?”

  “Per document.”

  “I see the problem,” Ted said.

  Jordan leaned forward. “What about this video you’ve got?” she asked. “Have you shown that to anybody yet?”

  “Just Gonzales.”

  “So it could be an exclusive,” Jordan said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Tuesday, May 30, 2056

  Christina Ferragamo stood with one hand resting on the back of a park bench and her high-heeled pumps planted firmly on the grass. The mauve and teal scarf masking her neck fluttered wildly in the wind. Her heavily-sprayed blonde hair never moved.

  Ted watched her from the sidewalk that bordered Johnny Carson Park across from NBC studios in Burbank. She looked like a decorative shrub, motionless in her trim mauve blazer and tree-bark gray skirt, with a helmet of yellow hair that resembled an inverted tulip.

  This, Ted thought, is what a celebrity TV reporter considers low profile. He had asked to meet her in an out-of-the-way place where they wouldn’t be seen, and she had chosen a park bench near the 134 freeway and Bob Hope Drive in plain view of two office buildings and the 6:30 p.m. traffic.

  Ted tucked his briefcase under his arm and crossed the grass to where she was standing. He extended his hand.

  “Mr. Braden?” Christina Ferragamo asked with a tight smile.

  “How are you?” Ted said.

  She shook his hand warmly. “I wish it weren’t so windy,” she said, blinking. “Bothers my contact lenses.”

  “My car’s right over there,” Ted said, “We could...” He stopped. His car had attracted a small crowd of admirers from a nearby softball game. “Maybe we could walk somewhere,” he said.

  “Let’s go across the street,” Christina said. She pointed toward Alameda Avenue and a few minutes later they were seated at a corner table in the bar of The Abattoir, an unrepentant steakhouse of the old school. Christina turned her teal blue contact lenses on him earnestly. “I understand you have some information for me,” she said in a low voice.

  Ted nodded. “Disclosure is the only place I would consider going with this information,” he said convincingly, “And you’re the only reporter I would consider talking to.”

  Christina beamed. He had her full attention.

  “The wrong man was executed for the Maria Sanders murder,” Ted said. “I have the proof right here.” He opened his briefcase, took out a disk and placed it on the table.

  Christina unzipped her handbag and pulled out a microvideo player no bigger than a romance novel. She flipped up the screen and inserted the disk into a slot in the base.

  The promo for Power Play blasted from the tiny speaker. Christina jabbed a button on the unit until the announcer’s voice was barely audible. Ted showed her where to freeze the frame, right at the moment where Robert Rand was standing in the alley, holding an aluminum baseball bat. Christina nodded, her expression a mixture of thoughtfulness and concern, her eyes still on the screen. She nodded again. Then she turned to Ted.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “It’s Robert Rand,” Ted said.

  Her face was awesome in its blankness.

  “The man who was convicted and executed for the murder of Maria Sanders. He didn’t do it. This is the proof.”

  Christina nodded knowingly. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  It took about an hour for Ted to explain it all to Christina, and for Christina to tell Ted she wasn’t interested in doing the story unless he could produce one of three things: a witness recanting, a confession from the real killer, or a document from the D.A.’s office that would prove someone knowingly prosecuted the wrong man. Then she signed the tab, shook Ted’s hand, and left the bar.

  Ted crossed the street and walked back toward the park, feeling uneasy. Though it was only 7:30, the streets seemed oddly empty. Then he saw it: an open space where his Corvette had been parked. Seven feet above the curb, shining in the beige glow of a smoggy sunset, was a sign reading, “Towaway after 7 p.m.”

  Chinese funk music blared from Royce’s car when Ted opened the door. “Thanks for picking me up,” he said.

  Royce turned the volume down. “I’m sorry,” s
he said, “What did you say?”

  Ted leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “I said, thanks for picking me up.”

  “Oh, no problem. Your poor car. This is what happens when you park in fire lanes.”

  “I didn’t,” Ted said defensively. “I was totally legal. At least until seven o’clock.”

  “The thought of that car on a tow hook,” Royce said, shuddering. “Where are we going?”

  Ted consulted a scrap of paper in his hand. “Turn left when you get to San Fernando,” he said.

  “You know, I’m glad you called me,” Royce said. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Flynn.”

  “What about her?” Ted was always on guard on the subject of his daughter.

  “I promised to take her and two of her friends to Las Vegas for the Elvis Centennial. But now I can’t go. Peter booked me into a club in Orlando for two weeks and I just can’t turn it down. The money’s too good.”

  Ted smiled to himself. Royce wouldn’t turn down a singing gig if they paid her in Confederate war bonds. “When were you going to go?” he asked.

  “Next Friday night and Saturday night. Do you think you could take them? I know you hate Las Vegas but it’s only for the weekend and the girls are so looking forward to it.”

  “Sure,” Ted said.

  “Oh, thank you. You’re a wonderful father.” Royce turned left on San Fernando Road. “Okay, now where?”

  Ted consulted his note and read her the address. A minute later, Royce turned into the driveway of the impound lot. “I’ll wait here until you’re sure there’s no problem,” she said.

  Ted looked through the chain link fence and saw his Corvette parked directly in front of the office, surrounded by admirers.

  “There’s no problem,” he said. He took out his wallet. “I’ll just swap this for the car. It’s probably an even exchange.”

  Las Vegas, Nevada. Friday, June 9, 2056

  The sun was just touching the horizon as the plane approached McCarran International Airport. Streaks of candy pink soared across a brilliant blue sky, shamelessly upstaging the winking corridor of neon on the ground. The jet’s wheels rumbled against the runway and Flynn’s friend Nadia unbuckled her seat belt.