After I’d been processed they let me see a lawyer. I didn’t know and hadn’t called the one who appeared on the other side of the tempered-glass partition to talk to me. He said a mutual friend had suggested I needed legal help. Brenda must have called him though he didn’t name the friend and I didn’t ask. He had the dishevelled hair and eccentric threads of a rich old lefty and the folksy manner of a friend to the downtrodden, a guy who once he starts pulling on your ear won’t stop until you agree with everything he says. First thing he did was kick his chair back on to the rear tines and put his feet up so I could admire his snake-skin cowboy boots and blue jeans. The business card he pulled from the side pocket of his leather jacket read, Charles H. Belinsky, People’s Advocate. The jacket looked hand-made in a style inspired by those once worn by Native Americans, with leather fringe that hung six inches from the sleeves and breast. His bola tie had a chunk of turquoise big enough to bring down Goliath. He was in his sixties and had been married and divorced at least once a decade since his twenties. His newest ex-wife was twenty-eight. I started to call him mister but he rumbled with the insult and insisted I call him Chuck.
Belinsky was a man of strong opinions regarding the inadequacies of the criminal injustice system, as he called it. The police were holding me on illegal possession of a firearm – fair enough – but the hostile manner of my arrest was outrageous. I had not been wanted for anything except questioning in a case where no reasonable person would consider me a suspect. The way he saw it, they were fishing for bass without a licence and accidentally caught a trout. If the judge was a good game warden he’d rule they couldn’t go fishing for one and catch the other. Were I anything but a convicted felon they’d have to toss me back in the lake. Felons were fish of a different stripe. Every season was open season on felons and that was my predicament. I could holler that the gun was under the seat buried beneath a month of newspapers but the police officer would testify that the gun was in plain sight when he visually inventoried the car interior. No judge in the world would suppress the seizure. Once the court rules the gun was constitutionally seized, the fire is stoked, the frying pan is smoking, and I’m on it, about to be cooked. So the best thing for me to do, he advised, was give them bigger fish to fry. Did I know anybody a little higher up the food chain? If the police thought they could catch a bigger fish based on something I told them, they might be willing to let me off the hook.
‘They don’t want to go higher up the food chain, trust me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it involves a major movie star and a county supervisor watching a girl have sex with a dog.’
That slapped all four of his chair legs down to earth and a notebook on to the table. I gave an account of my time since the night of Gabe’s death, omitting the events that could get me into further trouble – the green card arrangement, hit-and-run on a parked car, three instances of assault and one kidnapping – but otherwise didn’t veer from the truth any more than was necessary. He took meticulous notes in a sloping script. The pen, I noticed, was Cartier. We agreed that he should first interview Frank Adams, who had seen the digital photographs of Burke and Danavitch and could establish the beginning of my alibi for Piña’s murder. If Frank couldn’t or wouldn’t corroborate the contents of the disk, Belinsky suggested we might want to consider refining our story to something we might be able to prove. I think this was his gentle way of telling me that he didn’t believe a word of what I said. About Gabe’s last night alive and who I thought had killed him I said nothing. He already suspected I might be crazy – no need to prove it to him.
At the Twin Towers, violent offenders are secured in tempered-glass cells, watched around the clock from a central control room. Everybody else on the women’s side is held in dorm-style housing. I got a glass cell. The cells were originally designed to hold one inmate. I shared mine with two others. Yvonne had two black eyes and a balloon lip. She’d shot her husband. I didn’t need to ask why. Louisa was a working girl on the needle. Normally she wasn’t a violent offender but she was booked in with two prior convictions and withdrawal pains. She wasn’t particularly pleasant company but then I don’t guess any of us were. After a maximum security dinner – no knives, forks, pepper or talking – I was pulled out of the cell for an interview with my parole officer.
‘You didn’t last long, did you?’ Her tone was part taunt, part regret and all contempt. I sat in the chair provided for me, folded my hands on the desk and stared straight ahead. She didn’t bother wrinkling the crisp blue sheet of her skirt on the chair opposite mine; while I sat she paced between my back and the door. ‘When were you released? Two weeks ago?’
‘Something like that.’
‘That’s not a record by the way but it does put you in the upper ten per cent.’
‘The gun isn’t mine.’ I knew from experience that consistency is one of the few weapons a convict can wield.
‘How could you be so stupid?’ Her face appeared over my neck sharp-angled as an axe. ‘Possession of a handgun, it’s automatic. Parole is revoked. You finish out your sentence plus the extra weight of the handgun.’
‘It was in my car by mistake.’
‘You were sentenced to seven years and you served four. That’s a three-year mistake.’
I came as close to begging as I ever would. She didn’t owe me any favours. ‘It was a stupid mistake, I’ll agree with that, but it wasn’t a criminal one. I hope when you make your decision whether to support me or not you’ll take that into consideration. I hope you understand I’m trying to do the right thing.’
‘While you’re at it, you’d better hope your story about the gun checks out one hundred per cent because if it doesn’t this conversation will be our last.’
She flashed out of the room like a zipper sealing up my body bag.
By habit I fell back into the rules and rhythms of the system. Everything required to control the inmates was located on the floor that housed us. Our movements were tightly supervised and regulated. They moved us from our cells and back like products on a disassembly line, stripping away our freedom, our independence and dignity. It was no different in this way than any other penal institution, just more efficient. I knew how to do easy time. The mingled essence of parasiticides, industrial cleaning solutions and too many bodies in too little space smelled so familiar that after a few hours I no longer noticed it. I did what they told me to do when they told me and above all I did it silently.
The aspect of jail I appreciated most was the time it allowed for concentrated thought, even if the impending length of my incarceration rendered that thinking purely theoretical. Though I suspected Earl of complicity in my husband’s murder he might have told the truth about the negatives. If the scalp collector had been the one to betray Gabe, then he would have tossed the apartment first, while Earl was occupied with the beating. Perhaps Gabe had implied he stored the negatives in his flat. Schuman’s rage at not finding those million-dollar strips of celluloid had resulted in the destruction I’d seen the night of my break-in. If the negatives were in the apartment and Gabe had confessed their location, Earl would have found them straight away. And if Earl had the negatives, why did he try to beat their location out of Lester? Just to fool everybody into thinking he was still looking for them? It seemed more likely, knowing what I did of his character, that Gabe lied to the scalp collector and lied to Earl and hid the negatives with someone else.
I slept hard and deep that night and when I awoke the face of one of my cell mates had changed age and colour. I stepped back on to the conveyor belt of the system, happy for the moment that I had been removed from the temptation to do myself more harm in the free world. At the end of a concrete corridor lit by a twitching fluorescent tube a steel door opened to a small room and the seated figure of Detective Keith Harker, dressed like a corporate executive in a blue suit and red striped tie. With the controlled aggressiveness of his every gesture, from the stone in his glance to the coiled hunch of his sh
oulders when he rolled his neck to crack the tension, he would always look like what he did for a living, no matter how he dressed. He was a hunter. The smell of spilled blood clung to him. When he looked at me I broke into a sweat.
‘You do have a talent for trouble,’ he said, just enough playfulness in his voice to sound condescending. ‘Married to one murder victim. Seen arguing with a second. Supposed to be meeting a third at the time of her death.’
‘I told Douglas what happened.’
‘You sure convinced him. He’s ready to book you a one-way ticket back to CIW.’
I didn’t get it. I asked, ‘Then why are you here?’
‘Because I interviewed Grimes.’
Then I got it. Even if Grimes stuck to the story we’d agreed to tell, Harker wouldn’t need to falsify, just twist the testimony and I’d twist with it. ‘How does he look? Last time I saw him was at the hospital.’
Harker stroked the left wing of his moustache with his right forefinger, like he was trying to tamp down a smile. ‘He doesn’t look so good. I’ve never seen so many unusual injuries from a car accident. His leg for instance, how do you suppose he broke his – whatchacallit – his patella?’
I thought about it, offered, ‘Probably got his boot hung up in the rear seat while the rest of his body was flying to the front.’
‘Probably right. The simplest explanation is usually the best. And the gunshot wound? How did he get shot in the foot, you think?’
‘Happened when we hit the pick-up. Had the thing in his shoulder holster and at impact it went off.’
‘That’s what he said. But I still don’t get it.’ Harker backed away from the table and hung his coat on the chair. Beneath the shoulder of his coat he wore a hand-tooled Mexican leather holster. He’d checked the gun at reception. He cupped his hand around the butt of the holster and did what looked like an awkward dance; he bent his left knee to bring the foot up behind him and, hopping to keep his balance, sighted down the leather barrel. ‘See, he’s right handed, and he packs under his left shoulder, so to shoot himself in his foot, the leg would have to – hell, I can’t do it, he’d have to be double jointed.’
I saw what he was getting at and the trap behind it: how was I supposed to know the angle of the entry wound? ‘Doesn’t look so hard to me.’ I stood with both feet flat on the floor, put my hand under my shoulder like it was a gun with the barrel pointing down. ‘Straight shot down to the foot, no mystery to it at all.’
He watched me not like a cop eyeballing a suspect or a guy across the bar who thinks if he stares hard enough your blouse will fall off but like a surfer looks at a curling wave or a climber the sheer face of a cliff; his look conveyed respect and more than a little aggression. He gently pressed my hand against my breast and sighted down my finger. ‘He wasn’t shot in the top of the foot. The bullet entered the sole of his foot and exited the top. Of course you couldn’t know that unless you pulled the trigger yourself.’ With gentle insistence he pressed against my hand until the finger rotated to point at the ceiling. Then he blew once on the tip, like a gunfighter. ‘You understand the problem I have with this. How could someone shoot himself in the bottom of his foot?’
‘You ever been in an automobile accident? A serious one? You go from forty miles an hour to zero in a hundredth of a second. That puts the body through some serious contortions. On impact his feet could have twisted up to his ears.’ I don’t know why I tried to convince him. Even if I was innocent – and I wasn’t – he’d report what he needed to put me away. I sat back down, folded my hands in front of me and waited.
‘You’d think if the gun went off in the car, I’d find the spent bullet somewhere. Unless the bullet deflected off his foot out the open side window. Was the side window open?’
I hadn’t thought of the bullet. It’s what you don’t see that trips you up. ‘I don’t remember.’
Harker tucked the file he’d brought into the room under his arm, stood over me, watched the top of my head for a solid minute. ‘That thing on your dashboard, that box, is it what I think it is?’
‘If you think it’s my husband it is, at least what’s left of him.’
‘Why is his murder so important to you? It was a green card marriage. We don’t care about that any more. You don’t have to prove anything. Why don’t you do yourself a favour and let it go?’
That luxury wasn’t available when somebody might be trying to kill me, I could have said. Or that their accusations had forced me into it as an act of self-preservation. Or that I wanted justice and revenge, even if I didn’t precisely know what those two words meant or how I’d feel if I received some approximation of both. I could have said any or all of that, but I didn’t. I just said, ‘I have ghosts.’
‘I can warn you about ghosts. They make you crazy.’ Harker opened the door, called the guard, looked at me over his shoulder. ‘But I think I’ve warned you too late.’
41
On the morning of my court appearance the guards loaded me with a half-dozen other women into a panel-van and cuffed my wrists to the seat. The ride was brief and silent. Our thoughts were private and our fears unspeakable. The next few hours would determine the course of years for each of us. Some would be released outright, others on bail, some returned to jail to curse the crime of being caught and too poor to pay, and the others, the damned, sentenced to spend a portion of their lives in a place even devils fear to tread. We did not know the face or spirit of our judge, who would speak for us or against us, or what we would say ourselves if called upon to speak. We were angry, confused, afraid and largely ignorant of our fates, and this made us silent.
The rear doors of the van swung open to a subterranean garage marked ‘inmate transfer area’. From all we could see during the blacked-out journey we had been delivered into hell. The guards pulled us one by one out of the van and herded us in a group down an angled corridor to a room with a concrete floor and caged fluorescent lights. This served as the holding area. We waited, some standing, most sitting on low benches. When one by one our case was called gloved hands led us by the arm up an elevator and down a secure hallway. At the end of the hall a door swung open to the courtroom where our fates would be decided. The faces in the courtroom largely ignored us as we entered, each absorbed in routine documents, consultation, coffee.
Belinsky stood when I entered the courtroom and made an elaborate show of offering me a chair beside his. In this small way he wished to remind the court that I was human. The judge swirled the tip of her pen over a document as I crossed beneath the bench, oblivious to his gesture. She read carefully through glasses suspended from a neck-chain that picked up the silver highlights in her crow-black hair. The fluorescent lights drained the colour of blood from her skin. I knew enough not to believe that because she was a woman she’d be merciful; one just like her had put me away the first time. In the front row of reserved seats Detective Douglas read a copy of Scandal Times propped on his knee. LAX BOMBER BABE BAGGED FOR SNAPPER SNUFFS, the headline ran. In the gallery behind him, I spotted Frank amid the spectators. He observed me without recognition, professional enough to cut my throat with his pen.
‘Are they going to arraign me for murder here?’ I asked Belinsky, shocked by the headline.
‘No, friend, the issue to be decided today is the gun found in your car, and only the gun.’ Measured against the sheriff uniforms, magisterial robes and slick suits, he cut an iconoclastic figure with his fringed leather jacket, blue jeans and bolo tie. No doubt he meant to. ‘Now, I had me a little talk with the prosecutor, and – no surprise here – he insisted that the judge would find the gun was legally seized. If they were of the mind to prosecute they could. Even if they don’t prosecute, the court can still rule that the gun warrants revocation of your parole. You follow me?’
‘The frying pan or the fire, I’m cooked either way,’ I said.
He tapped my hand once, lightly. ‘Exactly. I can tell you’re the type of person I don’t have to say things twice t
o. So I paid a social call to your friend, Mr Frank Adams, who admitted to having a copy of this disk you mentioned and –’
‘Wait a minute, he wasn’t supposed to…’ It didn’t take long to work out what happened. ‘He gave me the wrong disk!’ Frank kept the copy I asked him to make for the police and gave me a blank. No wonder Douglas thought I was a lunatic.
‘Regardless of how the disk came into his possession he’s sitting at the poker table now so we have to deal him into the game. He was generous enough to confirm for me in very graphic detail the pictorial content of this disk. Unfortunately, he refused to allow me to use it as a chit to bargain your legal exoneration.’
‘Bastard!’ I said it loud enough to turn the disapproving eye of the judge my way.
‘Like all members of his chosen profession, I’m sure he’s lower than the tits of a pregnant wiener dog. He did confide to me that the moment your parole was revoked the contents of the disk would be submitted for publication.’
My parole officer strode into the court just as the bailiff read out a case number with my legal name – Mary Alice Baker – attached. She clipped past the defence table without a glance in my direction and pulled out a chair next to the prosecutor. I lost all credibility with Douglas and Harker when I gave them a blank disk as evidence and now the State was poised to put me away for another four years because Frank wouldn’t turn over the copy he’d switched with the blank. He’d betrayed me not once but twice. My parole officer spoke rapidly and heatedly into the prosecutor’s ear.
Killing Paparazzi Page 23