by April Smith
Believe me, I was grateful. Devon County had gotten the bail reduced, from half a mil to one hundred thousand dollars, after arguing successfully that I was not a flight risk, nor, since this had been a crime of passion, a danger to the community. As a condition of the bail agreement, I would be on home detention under the supervision and responsibility of the FBI. Good friend and former supervisor Mike Donnato had volunteered.
As shocking as the daily dive into the frigid water was the realization of how a legal maneuver had taken me through the mirror, made me prisoner, incomprehensibly, of Mike Donnato’s life, and the choices he had made, from marrying Rochelle to having three kids to buying this house way out in the Valley.
“Why don’t you take a nap?” Mike had suggested during the long rush-hour slog back from jail.
I lay on the half-lowered passenger seat, staring up at the beige interior, body tissue swaying subtly on the bones. That might have been the low point: humbled and inert, in Mike Donnato’s station wagon.
The trees had filled in since I’d been there last, the ocher two-story postmodern had already increased in value by a third. We pulled in at sunset, the twin round windows reflecting like rosy moons, the development bathed in uncertain light. I had been condemned, of all things, to suburbia.
He guided me like a regular guest, between the faux Greek revival columns that framed the doorway, to the floral-scented living room, and soon a glass of red wine, trusting me with a long-stemmed goblet. He dumped a pile of catalogues from the mailbox on the coffee table and went upstairs. Someone was home from school. Soon I heard a halting clarinet.
Devon County was a former LAPD detective who had become a federal prosecutor and then gone into private practice. Over the years there had been a small growth industry in our town of cops going to law school and then representing their own, mainly because the policeman’s union often paid for representation. Devon was smart and capable, and, most of all, he was not a press whore. What everyone at the Bureau respected was how he kept a low profile in a potentially tabloid case where a state senator had been shot and wounded by his male lover, a senior federal agent out of our Sacramento field office who nobody had known was gay. Although he could have made the national news every night, Devon County considered it in the client’s best interest to keep that story out of the papers.
I first glimpsed Devon County through the heavy mesh of the booking cell. He was a hefty guy, overweight, with a shaved head and goatee, looking more like a con than a cop. It was barely dawn; he wore a sweatshirt and baggy warm-up pants; you might have thought he was out for a run, except for the crutch. He had become a lawyer because he had been forced to retire from the department on disability after a horrific crash during a high-speed chase. He made legendary use of the crutch in the courtroom.
There was to be no more “special handling.” Devon would remain outside the cell, I would be inside, and we would speak through yellowed mesh. When I protested there would be no privacy, Devon said that’s the way the lawyers liked it.
“You know why they have this double screen?” he asked. “So you can’t spit on your attorney.”
“I’d laugh if I knew how.”
“We’ll try to improve the jokes.”
“Devon,” I said right off, “you have women on your staff. Shouldn’t I have a woman represent me?”
He shook his head confidently. “You would suffer the backlash of the prosecution’s theory.”
“You already know the prosecution’s theory?”
“They will claim the obvious, which is you went after him in a fit of jealous rage. ‘Fatal attraction.’”
“Not true—”
He held up a hand. “Not now. You need a strong, macho guy as a counterpoint to all the cops they’re going to parade out, and I’m as close to macho as we’re going to come up with in the middle of the night on a Thursday.” Nor was he unhappy they had made me wait “while suffering unduly” for medical care. Another bullet in the macho ammo belt. I was feeling better after a couple of painkillers and a shot of penicillin from a spiffy young Asian doctor with beautiful shoes. They even gave me a cup of raspberry Jell-O. The bare outdated first-aid room in the jail had seemed like a Club Med vacation.
“You understand that you are being charged with attempted murder. You are looking at potential penalties of twenty-five years to life.”
Incomprehensible.
“Apparently the condition of the victim, Detective Andrew Berringer, has been upgraded to stable.”
“I wasn’t trying to kill him.”
“Stop!”
I cringed.
“You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.” He was speaking intently, close to the mesh. “We need to have a truthful, but very delicate discussion. The best way I can help you is if we talk about what happened very carefully.” “I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, you need to preserve your ability to use me as witness on my own behalf. You can’t put me on the stand if you know I would perjure myself.”
“Good. So let me ask the questions in my own peculiar way. This is not a tell-me-what-happened. It’s not like interrogating a suspect, all right? We have to do this surgically.”
“You’re talking to a pro,” I assured him. “Although it might not appear that way, under the circumstances.”
“I never forget who I’m talking to,” Devon said.
He produced a leather binder and a Cartier pen with a blue stone in the cap. In the following weeks, I would watch that stone as it whipped legal arabesques around my words.
“If the police were claiming that you were in apartment ten in Tahiti Gardens at nine-thirty p.m. Monday night, would they be wrong?”
“No, they would not be wrong.”
“If they claimed you fired a weapon at Detective Andrew Berringer, would they be wrong?”
“They would not be wrong, but — could I ask one thing?”
He waited.
“Is there some legal way I can stay involved with my kidnap investigation?” I told him about the Brennan case and how close we had come to capturing him.
“Not when you’re suspended from the Bureau, darlin’.”
“The Bureau’s going to drop the ball.”
“Nothing you can do about it.”
“Any way I can stay in touch with the victim?”
“Why would you want to stay in touch with the victim?”
“She’s a fifteen-year-old girl. Her world just ended. I don’t want to personally let her down.”
“Have you been very close to this little girl? Helped her through …” He gestured with the pen, indicating spirals of unnamed suffering.
“Yes.”
He wanted to know more. After I described our morning talks and how Juliana had opened up to me, his belly jumped and he belched like a bald, satiated Roman emperor, and went back to the shooting.
“If the police were to claim you were a frustrated, jealous woman who was trying to avenge a betrayal by her lover, would you have some other explanation? Yes or no?”
The blue-stoned pen tapped against the pad.
“Yes or no?” he prompted.
“Can we stop playing games and can I just tell you—”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“What would be your explanation?”
“I wanted to stop him.”
Devon nodded encouragingly.
“You wanted to stop him from what?”
“From hurting me any more. Physically hurting me.”
“Would that involve some kind of self-defense on your part?”
“Yes, it would.”
“Would it be true to say you shot him in self-defense?”
I had seemed to lose direction, lost in some elastic loop of time.
“Yes.”
“Did you feel in physical danger?”
“I just wanted him to leave.”
“Did he leave?”
“No.”
>
“What did he do?”
“He attacked me. He wouldn’t stop. I kicked him in the groin and he backed off, and I warned him, but he came back at me. I dropped to the gun. I warned him again. I started shooting. We fought over the gun, and he got it away from me. He never stopped once he started coming at me, and I kept pulling the trigger.” “So he kept coming.”
“He did.”
“Even when you warned him, showed him the gun?”
“That’s right.”
“Even when you shot him, he didn’t run, or take evasive action?”
“No.”
“Nothing was going to stop him.”
I was unaware of everything except Devon’s rapid breath on the other side of the mesh, intimate as a priest’s.
“Why,” I said, faltering, “didn’t he stop?”
“I think it’s very possible,” Devon answered, “Detective Berringer went to your apartment with the intention of killing you.”
“Killing me?”
“You thought it was the other way around?”
“I was the one with the gun.”
“Yes,” said Devon, “that was the surprise.”
After a moment I shook my head, as if waking from a dream.
“You’re kidding, right? This is one of those outrageous legal arguments—”
“You can’t be objective,” Devon said. “I can. All I hear is you blaming yourself. It is absolutely not out of the question that this cop, who is used to violence, possibly depressed, despondent, getting older, close to retirement, financial problems, high on drugs, who knows what, finally resents the demands made on him by all the women in his life, and goes over there and takes it out on someone.” “Very creative,” I said tiredly. “You should be a writer,” totally forgetting that Devon County was also a celebrity author with two thrillers on the best-seller list.
I climbed out of the pool, dizzy with all that flip turning. It was just a few steps from the scorching patio to the cool kitchen, with its light cabinets and vinyl daisy tile and microwave as big as a boxcar. The refrigerator had cold water in the door. Inside the walk-through pantry there were marshmallows and chocolate bits you could chug out of the bag, and a shelf of neon-colored breakfast cereals.
The boys drank Gatorade and powdered fruit punch; there were flats of sodas and wholesale sacks of chips in the garage. All this was new to me, and I was as curious about the stand-alone freezer stocked with chicken nuggets, hot dogs, twelve-pack Klondike bars, whole chickens and racks of ribs as I would have been visiting a family in Japan. I never realized you could buy such huge tubs of peanut butter or cans of soup big enough for the entire fourth grade.
Mike Donnato had taken care of his mother until she died, in this house, of stomach cancer. There were far-flung siblings, but Mike was the only one with the courage to stick it out. She had lived in one of those extra back rooms with a fireplace and TV that nobody really uses, except to dump unfolded laundry and discarded pets. There was a mossy reek from the terrarium that held the baby chameleons; the carpeting, a cheap oatmealy remnant, felt cold underfoot, some dankness having to do with the plumbing.
“Who farted?” was the standard greeting from the Donnato boys.
It was a room without hope to begin with — thinly walled, sliding glass doors opening to a useless jag of the yard, an odd space looking at the back fence. This was where I slept, on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by Mike’s parents’ effects, which were touchingly arranged as they had been in the hobby room of their big home in Glendale: Dad’s preoccupations in one half, Mom’s on the other. So you had a Bernina sewing machine, an ironing board and bins of fabric and envelopes of clothing patterns on one side; then a bench with a magnifying glass and all manner of fly-fishing materials and magazines. There were other oddities — a rocking horse, a white cabinet I had not opened, valuable-looking antique wicker chairs, jug lamps, vinyl records (A Swingin’ Christmas), framed art posters from the seventies, and the kinds of novels people don’t read anymore: Lord Jim, Catch-22, Shogun, Cancer Ward, The Black Marble, War and Remembrance. If I didn’t feel bad enough, I could wallow in the ash-cold remnants of two extinguished lives.
“Free on bail” was not the way I would have put it. I was free to wander through the living room, lie on the beat-up burgundy-colored sectional (if I wanted to vacuum the cat hair), or sit in Mike’s reclining chair and look at cable on a big blurry-screened TV. I could pace the hallway, passing the bedrooms in about four seconds — no daylight, nothing on the walls, except the kids’ doors plastered with Police Line Do Not Cross tape and puzzles that spelled their names, Kevin, Justin, Ian.
I was free to sit on the small deck with the standard grill and white plastic umbrella table, and look up at a patch of milky sky, and know this was a preview, an aperitif, of prison life. I missed my lifeguard friend. I missed the shower talk and the redtail hawks that sailed above the pool in perfect freedom.
Andrew? I didn’t know who he was anymore.
The highlight of the day would be the call from the law firm, usually with more bad news.
I learned, one standard-issue hot ’n’ hazy valley morning, that the deputy district attorney prosecuting my case would be Mark Rauch, and realized, way too late, the devastating mistake I had made in not involving Mark Rauch in the Santa Monica kidnapping, not paying respects, not providing a political opening for which he might show gratitude, or at least mercy. This might have been the reason Rauch maneuvered to be assigned to this case — or more likely, he saw it as a high-profile opportunity to continue to build a citywide presence for a mayoralty run. So much for keeping us out of the press. The words “slam dunk” were being bandied about the courthouse.
“He’s a scary guy,” I told Devon.
“Why?”
“Hold up a mirror. He has no reflection.”
“He puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like you and me.”
“I’ve seen him work. If you call making little kids cry on the stand ‘work.’”
“Come on now, keep that candle burning.”
“Say again?”
“That pilot light of competition. I know you’ve got it in you; maybe it’s low right now, but don’t let it blow out.”
“Is that what the game is for you, Devon?”
“Oh, I’ve got my competitive streak. I like to know I can beat you at something.”
For a moment I felt myself coming alive.
“What if I nailed Ray Brennan?”
“Who is Ray Brennan?”
“The serial rapist I told you about. The case I was working on when—”
“There are seven reasons why you can’t go there,” he said with such gravitas I believed he had already counted.
“Wouldn’t it prove worthiness of character if I went out and found the son of a bitch?”
“It would be a violation of the bail agreement.”
“That’s minor, compared to—”
“Let it go,” he said firmly. “There are other trained and competent people who will continue your work and bring this creep to justice, okay? I know how it is to sit out there alone and have revenge fantasies—”
“It’s not a fantasy, it’s my job.”
“This is your job: focus and prepare. Things are about to get very real.”
I taped the picture of Ray Brennan over the fireplace in the hobby room.
Now it felt like home.
Sub: Hang in there
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Just to let you know I am thinking of you and hoping you’re doing okay. My heart goes out to you, it must be so difficult to face what you are facing. Your friend is out of the hospital. I’ll come and see you soon.
Love,
Barbara
Subj: Santa Monica Kidnapping
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Don’t worry, the ball is still in play. Here’s a recap:
Brennan remains at large. We obtained a warrant to search the Santos apartment. In answer to your question, yes, we did check the shoes, first thing. We did not locate the actual lug sole boots, but we did recover size 10 athletic shoes that, according to Dr. Arnie (what a nut), match the wear pattern from the shoe print on Juliana’s back. So Carl Vincent IS Brennan. He ditched the situation in Arizona to come here and go hunting. The picture is coming clear of Brennan’s deal with Mrs. Santos. She is an abuser, in and out of the Program, lost the kids for a while. Social services has volumes on her. The kids come from different dads. Brennan worked in Thrifty drugstore, in the photo department. Met Roxy and got friendly, cultivated her, like Juliana. Mother claims he’s a great provider. That’s a good one. Fired for stealing. Mother denies he molested Roxy. Claims they are all religious. Total denial. Anyway, easy ducks for Brennan. Sorry for your troubles. Everyone here backs you up.
Sincerely,
Jason Ripley
Subj: Hang in there
From: [email protected]
To:[email protected]
Look at it this way: at least you are missing the 90-day file review. Galloway is in his office with a migraine.
Subj: Santa Monica Kidnapping
From: J. [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Just to keep you posted: Brennan’s father was also former military but he and the mom were divorced. According to Mrs. Santos, Brennan grew up somewhere around Culver City, maybe the post-war housing you told me about? Could that be the answer to the question of why he returned— to old stomping ground? Yes, as you suggested, we are searching the homeless shelters for transient named Willie John Black. Possible Brennan is hiding out with him or others.
Sincerely,
Jason Ripley
Subj: Hang in there
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sorry, have to cancel our visit. Two bank jobs yesterday and the baby has a cold. Miss you.
B.
Mike Donnato’s wife, Rochelle, was a very efficient person who used hot rollers and who, God knows, could track the roasts in the freezer and the kids’ activities, both of which she penciled in on a calendar that hung in a nook completely devoted to scheduling. She was a good lady, a scuba instructor, who besides holding down a full-time job in a management firm, which she got after going back to law school, volunteered with a program to teach underprivileged kids to scuba dive. She had been an FBI wife for seventeen years, during the days when postings changed year to year. Their oldest boy had gone to four different schools.