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Andi, who had been taking a sip of her orange juice, gulped and put the glass down. ‘The press’ll have a field day. It’ll probably turn into another black rights versus women’s rights circus.’
‘And don’t I know it! The defense will raise the specter of the Scottsboro Boys and the prosecution will use everything they can throw at the defendant from Mike Tyson to O.J. Simpson.’
Andi nodded sympathetically.
‘And caught in the middle of it is one frightened little girl, not yet out of her teens.’
‘You think you can handle it?’
‘Oh, I can handle it all right. I’ve been there before, remember. The question is, can the victim?’
‘And can she?’
Gene shook her head, sadly. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s letting herself in for.’
‘Have they got a suspect?’
‘Yes.’
‘Has she ID-ed him?’
‘Yes. Only they released him pending DNA results.’
Andi sat forward, part eager, part concerned. She had known Gene long enough to pick up the nuances in her words as well as her tone.
‘Well if she ID-ed him then maybe she’s tougher than you think.’
‘She’s not tough. She’s just naïve. She doesn’t realize that she’s going to carry the can for two centuries of racial persecution.’
Saturday 6 June 2009 – 11.00 (#ulink_64125e61-100b-5437-b1d1-93acbf196dad)
Albert Carter was an old man. Not a wise old man, not a crusty old man, not even really a frail old man, just an old man who had lived a full life and been around the block a few times. He wasn’t in the best of health, having done his share of smoking and drinking, before he gave it up when he noticed it slowing him down a bit. But he was a lonely old man, having lost his first wife to divorce and his second to the Grim Reaper.
Oh yes, the Reaper.
There were many weapons in the Reaper’s arsenal, and Albert Carter couldn’t even pronounce the name of the disease that had claimed Hildegard.
His children were still around, but he had lost them to professional migration. He saw them at Christmas and on his birthday, but that was pretty much it. One lived in Utah and one in Boston. The one in Utah was a store manager and the one in Boston some kind of academic. He understood the work of the former more than the latter, but, both had families and neither came out west very often.
So he spent his days watching TV, reading the newspaper and – with diminishing frequency – bowling with his old friends. It was a dull, repetitive chapter towards the latter part of his book of life, but he had his basic needs and he didn’t want more. All he yearned for was a bit less arthritic pain. Oh, and he wished that the cops would do more to round up those gangs who were turning the neighborhood into such an unpleasant place. He knew who they were…in a generic sort of way, at least.
It was while he was watching the TV alone one night, he saw a news report about the Bethel Newton rape case, saying how a famous local talk show host had been arrested and then released. They didn’t have any footage from the police station, but they showed a still photograph of the girl and stock footage from the man’s talk show. Apparently he’d been arrested after shooting the latest show, yet to be broadcast.
And that was when Carter got the feeling.
He didn’t remember the details too clearly – the whole thing had happened just too fast. But there was one thing that he remembered.
For a moment he hesitated, realizing that criminals could sometimes be vengeful towards people who snitched. But then he remembered his own, all-too-frequent words about the cowards who don’t speak out when criminals destroy their communities. He didn’t want to be like one of those people whom he routinely criticized. He knew now that it was his civic duty to speak out and he didn’t want to be like all the shirkers.
So he dragged his weary bones out of the comfort of his tattered, dust-ridden armchair and trudged over to the phone.
Friday 12 June – 9.40 (#ulink_5b5050a0-cf35-5669-8795-32e999a69db7)
Detective Bridget Riley was a victim chaperone, not a counselor. She was the principal point of contact between the investigating officers and the rape victim. The detectives investigating the case put most of their questions through Bridget. When they had to put questions directly or when others had to have contact with the victim, such as during the medical examination, the victim chaperone had to be there.
She had a sporty, athletic look about her, the tough look of a kick boxer. Male colleagues found her attractive and her face, highlighted against her raven-colored hair, was potential photographic model material. But what would be a blessing in the world of show biz, could be something of a curse in the locker room culture of the police.
Because of her looks, Bridget had been the target of sexual harassment by her colleagues. And it had made her tough. She could take the compliments with a smile and a shrug and when they became vulgar she hit back with a glib ‘in your dreams, buster.’
When one of the rookies was bold enough to try to pin her against a locker, showing off in front of three of his friends, she deterred him from further action with a well-placed fist to the groin. Then she added insult to injury by asking him if he wanted her to kiss it better. The rookies never bothered her again; nor had anyone else in the department during the four years since.
Bridget was sitting at her desk typing up a report on a domestic violence case for Sarah Jensen at the D.A.’s office, when a female officer dropped a fax on her desk. But Bridget did not look up.
Sarah Jensen, the Assistant District Attorney in charge of the domestic violence division at the Ventura County D.A.’s office, was no less determined than Bridget to nail these bastards who beat their wives or girlfriends. But Sarah Jensen was a realist. She was also very ambitious. She knew that unsuccessful prosecutions damaged the reputation of the department, and gave her a poor track record, personally. So Bridget knew that she had to word every sentence carefully to give Sarah the impression that this was a winnable case.
When she looked at the fax, her eyes lit up. She scooped it up and rushed out of the room.
Friday, 12 June 2009 – 10.30 (#ulink_d015c249-64d0-57d4-9fc8-94df15db1241)
Sitting on a lounging chair on the deck of his Mediterranean-style villa, looking out onto the ocean, Elias Claymore realized that crime and repentance had served him well. His present surroundings were a far cry from the ramshackle hut where he had been born and the rat-infested ‘hood where he had grown up.
The villa stood in landscaped grounds on the sands of Montecito’s most prestigious beach and had breathtaking views of the ocean from nearly every room. There was a huge living room with fireplace, bar and ocean view, a beachside kitchen, two beachside bedrooms each with a fireplace, and a third at the back. Even the office had an ocean view. There was also a separate guest apartment, a large beachfront deck, a sunset view seaside spa, majestic trees and flowering gardens and seventy-five feet of private beachfront.
But how far had he really come?
‘You can take the man out of the ghetto,’ the racists had taunted, ‘but you can’t take the ghetto out of the man.’ And much as it pained his troubled conscience, the racists were right on this one, albeit in the most literal sense. A ghetto is a place of retreat where one is surrounded by one’s own kind yet is constantly under threat from those outside. And right now Elias felt besieged.
His mind drifted back to what his life had once been like. He used to think that the pain was all over. He had never forgotten what he had done. But after all these years he thought it would no longer come back to haunt him. Yet the events of the past week had proved him wrong – and it was like a slow, drawn-out torture.
He tried to soften the pain by reminding himself what had driven him to do the things he had done and become the man he became, thinking back to the time he was nine when two white policemen raped his mother before his eyes. He had tried to stop them, but one of them had grabbed him and twisted his arm behind his back, forcing him to watch while the other had pinned his mother to the ground, ripped her clothes and forced himself into her as she screamed and begged for mercy.
She had brought up Elias alone, without the help of a man, and she had always been a strong figure in his early years, dishing out the punishment while protecting him from the bigger kids in the ‘hood. But she couldn’t protect herself from this. And Elias Claymore learned in those few minutes that his mother, who had been like a pillar of support for the entire world as he knew it, was powerless in the face of this invading force in their own home.
And through his childish eyes, little Elias knew why. She was a woman – and women were weaker than men. He couldn’t expect a woman to protect him. It was for men to be strong and to protect women…or violate them. That was how it was in other households. He had seen the local pimps slapping their girls around and he quickly learned that this was the natural order in the world. It was normal for men to dominate women.
But these men who had invaded his house and raped his mother were not their men. They were an alien presence. These were the pigs who beat up blacks just because they were black. These were the people who called him ‘Nigger’ and made him afraid whenever they walked by, knowing that he daren’t respond to their racist taunts. And now they were here in his home, doing…this thing…to his mother.
He couldn’t blame her for being weak. But it was her fault that they didn’t have a man to protect them. She had driven him away. That’s what one of his brothers had told him. She had called Elias’s father a no-good, drunken deadbeat and thrown him out of the house. But now he realized how much they needed a man in this household…and they didn’t have one because of her.
He realized in that moment that one day he would be a man. He would be big and strong and then there’d be hell to pay! Because then he’d be able to fight back…and he’d hit them where it hurt. He’d hit their weakness – their women.
He was shaken out of his unhappy daydream by a loud, aggressive knocking on the front door.
‘Who is it?’ he called out.
‘This is the police! We have a warrant for your arrest.’
Friday, 12 June 2009 – 13.00 (#ulink_c3b34b33-7ca0-5e30-803c-350acdff7ce4)
‘This time we’ve got a witness,’ said Lieutenant Kropf.
‘Who?’ asked Alex.
‘You’ll find out soon enough.’
Alex had flown down to Los Angeles from San Francisco as soon as he heard of Claymore’s second arrest, having told his client not to say a word until he got there. He knew that the cops would try their usual tricks – telling the suspect that they were more likely to believe him if he spoke freely on the record, without getting all ‘lawyered up.’ But Alex had been firm.
‘Don’t fall for it,’ he had warned. ‘The issue is not whether they believe you, but whether they’ve got a case. They’re capable of talking themselves into anything. You just stay cool and hang on till I get there. If they’ve got no case, they can’t act. If they think they’ve already got one, then nothing you can say will make any difference.’
‘What exactly did this witness see?’ Alex assumed that someone hadn’t just stood there watching a rape and doing nothing about it.
‘He saw your client running away from the crime scene,’ said Kropf, regretting it a moment later.
He.
Alex picked up on it. So the witness was a man…or a boy. And he had only seen Claymore allegedly running away from the crime scene, not the rape. That was a very different thing.
And Kropf had also let slip that an ID had already been made.
‘Wait a minute, you put my client in a line-up when I wasn’t there?’
‘We didn’t need to,’ said the lieutenant. ‘He recognized him from the news reports.’
They hadn’t said anything about a witness at the time of Claymore’s first arrest. And even if he was right about the identity of the man running away, how did he know that it was from the scene of a rape? If he had known at the time, would he not have stayed to help the victim? Or given his name to the police? And would they not have said something about a witness at the time of the first arrest? And put Claymore in a line-up? But now they were saying that this man had recognized Claymore from the news reports. That meant that he didn’t stick around at the time.
Why not? Had he been afraid? Why would he be afraid if the rapist had run away? Was he afraid to get involved? Was he afraid of the police? Was he a criminal himself? Had he really seen something? Had he even been there? Or was he one of the legion of freeloaders who come out of the woodwork in high profile cases, looking to make a quick buck?
‘Can I see his statement?’ asked Alex.
At a certain point, if they decided to proceed against Claymore, they’d have no alternative but to show him the statement. However at this stage, they owed him nothing, not even the name of the witness.
‘You’ll get it from the D.A. with the rest of the discovery material.’
That sounded ominous, like they had already made up their minds to charge Claymore.
‘I don’t suppose you’d like to give my client an opportunity to explain what he was doing there?’
‘What, you mean why he was at a crime scene at the time of the crime when he had previously claimed to be at home? No, as a matter of fact, we wouldn’t.’
Alex realized that he was in a tight spot. The police were under no obligation to give Claymore a chance to explain himself, now that they had a witness to put him at the crime scene. They could do so, if they wanted to. But they didn’t have to. If they decided to go to trial, Claymore would have to take his chances with a jury.
The door opened and Bridget entered. She signaled the lieutenant over and whispered in his ear while showing him a piece of paper. The lieutenant was nodding seriously and the expression on his face looked grave. Alex suspected that this scene was being staged. He had seen this sort of thing dozens of times before.
The lieutenant came back to the table. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ he asked Alex.
‘Just cut the crap and spit it out,’ said Alex.
‘We just got back the results of the DNA test.’
Alex suspected that they already had the results before rearresting Claymore. They wouldn’t have arrested him on the strength of the witness’s ID alone, when the test results were still pending.
‘And?’ asked the lawyer tensely.
‘We didn’t have any DNA in the vaginal swab because the rapist used a condom. But the victim scratched the rapist’s face and so we were able to get a good DNA sample from under her fingernails. Want to know what the results were?’
‘Spill it,’ said Alex, realizing where this was going.
The lieutenant handed the fax over to Alex, watching his face for a reaction with a growing sense of excitement. But when Alex perused it, the emotion he felt was anger – not towards Kropf, but towards his own client. And when he showed it to his client, the look on Claymore’s face was one of confusion…and fear.
Friday, 12 June 2009 – 14.30 (#ulink_27e19d94-bcac-5d8c-afa4-8b7376a4ce36)
‘Your Honor,’ Alex Sedaka’s voice rang out confidently, ‘although my client has a criminal record, his last criminal conviction was over twenty years ago.’
They were in Court 13 of the Ventura Courthouse, in the same building where Claymore was being detained. It was a crowded courtroom with backless spectators’ benches and a large cage for holding prisoners. Being based up north in the Bay area, Alex had never had to practice here before, but he knew that this was one of the busiest courts in the country, essentially a meat factory for arraignments, scheduling motions and defendants’ pleas. With 200 cases a day to process, user-comfort was a luxury that they couldn’t afford.
‘Mr Claymore has strong roots in the community,’ Alex continued. ‘And for the last ten years has been a model citizen.’
In truth, Alex was rather less confident than he sounded. The warrant for the second arrest had been a no-bail warrant, because of Claymore’s past, a powerful indicator of which way the judge’s thinking was heading. Alex would have liked to file for an interim appeal. But he knew that his grounds were weak to nonexistent. Denying bail to a man who had previously escaped from prison and stayed at liberty for several years was hardly unreasonable.
But his training and experience as a trial lawyer, permitted him to conceal the doubt – indeed required him to conceal it.
So it was with this turbulent mixture of emotions that Alex was addressing the judge. Except that he was all too aware that he wasn’t addressing only the judge. This was Claymore’s first appearance in court since his arrest and predictably enough it had attracted a lot of public attention. The courtroom was packed with reporters and Alex knew how important it was to get the message out there into the stream of news as quickly as possible, to counteract the negative effect of Claymore’s well-known past.
It was inevitable that the media would dredge up Claymore’s history; there would be no restrictions on public discussion of the facts of the case. Gag orders could be imposed at the judge’s discretion, but there was no automatic sub-judice rule.
As Alex sat down, a woman of about forty, of average height with neat, jet-black hair, rose from her chair to dispute the point. She was Sarah Jensen, the Assistant District Attorney who headed the domestic violence division of the D.A.’s office. Alex had never crossed swords with her before but he was well aware of her reputation. Some prosecutors are tough but not good. Others are good but not tough. Sarah Jensen was both tough and good.
‘Your Honor,’ there was an angry, almost contemptuous edge to the voice, ‘Elias Claymore’s record is well known and the defense counsel conveniently failed to mention that he not only raped six women in the past, but he also escaped from prison last time he was convicted and remained at liberty for several years. For this reason alone, he is a very serious flight risk.’
Alex was back on his feet. ‘Your Honor, the Assistant District Attorney seems to have conveniently forgotten that my client returned to America voluntarily to serve out his sentence.’
It was Alex who, as a young law graduate, still learning his craft, had negotiated the plea bargain.
‘And why should that outweigh the fact that he fled in the first place?’ asked the judge, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
The judge was an old man, close to retirement from the bench. He had seen and heard just about every piece of bullshit that lawyers were capable of throwing at him, and if there were any new tricks to be learned – even from a veteran like Alex – he would have been most surprised.
‘Because it’s a more recent event, Your Honor. And in judging a man’s character, the court should give more weight to his recent past than his distant past.’ He placed the emphasis on his key words, in the hope of neuro-linguistically programming the judge to respond as he wanted.
‘You mean the fact that he returned to the United States to serve out his sentence after he escaped?’
‘Precisely, Your Honor.’
The judge squirmed with mock embarrassment and scratched his head. ‘Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, Mr Sedaka, but he could hardly have done it before he escaped.’
The courtroom erupted with mirth at the judge’s wisecrack and Alex felt the frustration that goes with knowing that one faces an uphill struggle against a hostile judge – especially when the hostile judge has the law on his side.
The gallery, packed with journalists who had got wind of Claymore’s arrest, sensed that this was the beginning of another media event, like the O.J. Simpson trial.
