2nd Chance (25 page)

She groaned and started reading the file.

The trial had taken nine days. It took the rest of the morning for her to go through it. She sifted through the pretrial hearings, jury selection, the opening statements. Coombs’s precious record was brought out. Numerous citations for mishandling situations on the street where blacks were involved. Coombs was known for off-color jokes and pejorative remarks. Then came a painstaking re-creation of the night in question. Coombs and his partner, Stan Dragula, on patrol in Bay View. They encounter a schoolyard basketball game. Coombs spots Gerald Sikes. Sikes is basically a good kid, the prosecution conveys. Stays in school, is in the band; one blemish when he had been rounded up two months before in a sweep of the projects looking for pushers.

Jill read on.

As Coombs busts up the game, he starts taunting Sikes. The scene gets ugly Two more patrol cars arrive. Sikes shouts something at Coombs, then he takes off. Coombs follows. Jill studied several hand-drawn diagrams illustrating the scene. After the crowd is subdued, two other cops give chase. Patrol Officer Tom Fallone is the first to arrive.
Gerald Sikes is already dead.

The trial and notes ran over three hundred pages – thirty-seven witnesses. A real mess. It made Jill wish she’d been the prosecuting attorney. But nowhere was there anything implicating Marty Boxer.

If he was there that night, he was never called.

By noon, Jill had made her way through the depositions of witnesses. The murder of Sikes had taken place in a service alley between Buildings A and B in the projects. Residents claimed to have heard the scuffle and the boy’s cries for help. Just reading the depositions turned Jill’s stomach. Coombs was Chimera; he had to be.

She was tired and discouraged. She’d spent half a day plowing through the file. She had almost gotten to the end when she found something odd.

A man who claimed he’d witnessed the murder from a fourth-story window.
Kenneth Charles.

Charles was a teenager himself. He had a juvie record. Reckless mischief, possession. He had every reason, the police said, to create trouble.

And no one else backed up what Charles said he saw.

As she read through the deposition, a throbbing built in Jill’s head. Finally, it was sharp, stabbing. She buzzed her secretary. “April, I need you to get me a police personnel file. An old one. From twenty years ago.”

“Give me the name. I’m on it.”

“Marty Boxer,” Jill replied.

A
CHILLY
BAY
BREEZE
sliced through the night as Jill huddled on the wharf outside the
BART
terminal station.

It was after six. Men in blue uniforms, still wearing their Short-billed caps, came out of the yard, their shift over. Jill searched the exiting group for a face. He may have been a juvie with a police record twenty years before, but he had straightened his life out. He’d been decorated in the service, married, and for the past twelve years worked as a motorman with
BART
. It had taken April only a few hours to track him down.

A short, stocky black man in a black leather cap and a 49ers windbreaker waved good-bye to a few coworkers and made his way over to her. He eyed her warily. “Office manager said you were waiting for me? Why’s that?”

“Kenneth Charles?”
Jill asked.

The man nodded.

Jill introduced herself and handed him her card. Charles’s eyes widened. “I don’t mind saying, it’s been a long time since anyone at the Hall of so-called Justice took an interest in me.”

“Not you, Mr. Charles,” Jill answered, trying to set him at ease. “This is about something you might have witnessed a long time ago. You mind if we talk?”

Charles shrugged. “You mind walking? My car’s over here.” He motioned her through a chain-link gate to a parking lot on the wharf.

“We’ve been digging through some old cases,” Jill explained. “I came across a deposition you had given. The case against Frank Coombs.”

At the sound of the name, Charles came to a stop.

“I read your deposition,” Jill went on. “What you said you saw. I’d like to hear about it.”

Kenneth Charles shook his head in dismay. “No one believed anything I said back then. They wouldn’t let me come to trial. Called me a punk. Why you interested now?”

“You were a kid with a rap sheet who’d been in the system twice,” Jill answered honestly.

“All that’s true,” Kenneth Charles said, “but I saw what I saw. Anyway, there’s a lot of water under the bridge since then. I’m twelve years toward my pension. If I read right, a man served twenty years for what he did that night.”

Jill met his eyes. “I guess I want to make sure the right man did spend twenty years for that night. Look, this case hasn’t been reopened. I’m not making any arrests. But I’d like the truth. Please, Mr. Charles.”

Charles took her through it. How he was watching TV and smoking weed, how he’d heard scuffling outside his window shouting, then a few muffled cries. How when he looked out, there was this kid, being choked.

Then, as Jill listened, everything changed. She took in a sharp breath.

“There were two men in uniform. Two cops holding Gerald Sikes down,” Charles told her.

“Why didn’t you do something?” Jill asked.

“You have to see it like it was back then. Then, you wore blue, you were God. I was just this punk, right?”

Jill looked deeply into his eyes. “You remember this second cop?”

“I thought you said you weren’t making any arrests.”

“I’m not. This is something personal. If I showed you a picture, you think you could pick him out?”

They resumed walking and arrived at a shiny new Toyota. Jill opened her briefcase, took out the picture. She held it out for him. “Is this the policeman you saw, Mr. Charles?”

He stared at the photo for a long moment. Then he said, “That’s the man I saw.”

I
SPENT
THAT
WHOLE
DAY
at the Hall, on the phone with the field or at a grid map of the city overseeing the manhunt for Frank Coombs.

We placed a watch on several of his known acquaintances and places where we thought he might run, including Tom Keating’s. I did a trace on the yellow Bonneville that had picked Coombs up and ran the phone numbers found on his desk. No help there. By four, the guy who had rented the house in South San Francisco had turned himself in insisting it was the first time he had met Coombs.

Coombs had no money, no belongings. No known manner of transport. Every cop in the city had his likeness.
So where the hell was he?

Where was Chimera? And what would he do next?

I was still at my desk at seven-thirty when Jill walked in. She was only a few days out of the hospital. She had on a brown wrap raincoat, with a Coach briefcase slung over her shoulder. “What’re you still doing here?” I shook my head. “Go home and rest.”

“You got a minute?” she asked.

“Sure, pull up a chair. Afraid I don’t have a beer to offer.”

“Don’t worry” She smiled, opening her bag and removing two Sam Adamses. “I brought my own.” She tilted one toward me.

“What the hell.” I sighed. We had no trace on Coombs, and it was clear in Jill’s face that something was bothering her. I figured it was Steve, already humping some new deal, leaving her alone again.

But as soon as she unzipped her case, I saw the blue personnel folder. And then a name,
Boxer; Martin C.

“I must’ve told you,” Jill said, cracking her beer and sitting herself down across from me, “that my father was a defense lawyer back in Highland Park.”

“Only a hundred times.” I flashed her a smile.

“Actually he was the best lawyer I ever saw. Totally prepared, unswayed by race or what a client could pay. My dad, the totally upright man. Once, I watched him work a case at night at home for six months to overturn the conviction of an itinerant lettuce farmer who was falsely convicted on a rape charge. A lot of people back then were pushing my dad to run for Congress. I loved my dad. Still do.”

I sat there silently, watching her eyes grow moist. She took a swig of beer. “Took me until I was a senior in college to realize the bastard had cheated on my mother for twenty years. The big upstanding man, my hero.”

I broke into a faint smile. “Marty’s been lying to me all along, hasn’t he?”

Jill nodded, pushing my father’s dog-eared personnel file along with a deposition across my desk. The deposition had been folded open to a page highlighted in yellow. “You might as well read it, Lindsay.”

I braced myself and, as dispassionately as I could, read through Kenneth Charles’s testimony. Then I read it over again. All the while, a sinking feeling of disappointment. And then fear. My first reaction was not to believe it; anger filled me. But at the same time, I knew it had to be true. My father had lied and covered up his whole life. He had conned and bullshitted and disappointed anyone who ever loved him.

My eyes welled up. I felt so betrayed. A tear burned its way down my cheek.

“I’m so sorry, Lindsay. Believe me, I hated to show you this.” Jill reached out a hand and I took it, squeezed hard.

For the first time since becoming a cop, I had no idea what to do. I felt a chasm widening; it couldn’t be filled with anything that resembled duty or responsibility or right.

I shrugged, draining the last of my beer. I smiled at Jill. “So whatever happened to your father? Is he still with your mom?”

“
Fuck,
no,” she said. “She was so tough sometimes, so cool. I just loved her. She threw him out when I was in law school. He’s been living in a two-bedroom condo in Las Colinas ever since.”

I started to laugh, a painful laugh that mixed with the disappointment and the tears. When I stopped, I was left with this crushed feeling in my heart and all these questions that wouldn’t go away. How much had my father known? What had he kept silent about? And finally what was his connection to Chimera?

“Thanks,” I said. I squeezed Jill’s hand again. “I owe you, sweetie….”

“What are you going to do, Lindsay?”

I folded my jacket over my arm. “What I should’ve done a long time ago. I’m going to find out the truth.”

M
Y
FATHER
WAS
IN
THE
MIDDLE
of a game of solitaire when I got home.

I shook my head, slightly averting my eyes. I trudged into the kitchen, pulling a Black & Tan out of the fridge. I came over and sank into the chair across from him.

My father looked up, maybe feeling the heat of my eyes. “Hey, Lindsay.”

“I was thinking, Dad… about when you left….”

He continued flipping through the deck of cards. “Why do you want to go through that now?”

I kept my gaze on him. “You took me down to the wharf for some ices. Remember? I do. We watched the ferries coming in from Sausalito. You said something like, ‘‘m gonna get on one of those in the next few days, Buttercup, and I won’t be back for a while.’ You said it was something between you and Mom. And for a while I waited. But for years I always wondered,
Why did you have to leave?”

My father’s lips moved as if he were trying to frame a response, then he stopped.

“You were dirty weren’t you? It was never about you and Mom. Or the gambling, or the booze.
You helped Coombs murder that boy
. That’s what it was all along. Why you left? Why you came back? None of it had anything to do with us. It was all about you.

My father blinked, trying to spit out a reply. “No… ”

“Did Mom even know? If she did, she always gave us the party line, that it was your gambling, and the alcohol.”

He put down the deck of cards. His hands were trembling. “You may not believe it, Lindsay, but I always loved your mother.”

I shook my head, and I wanted to get up and hit my father. “You couldn’t have. No one could hurt someone they love that much.”

“Yes, they can.” He wet his lips. “I’ve hurt you.”

We sat there, frozen in silence, for a few moments. The washed-over anger of so many years was hurtling back at me.

“How did you find out?” he asked.

“What does it matter? I was going to find out eventually.”

He looked stunned, like a fighter hit with a solid uppercut. “That trust, Lindsay, it’s been the best thing to happen to me in twenty years.”

“Then why did you have to use me, Dad? You used me to get to Coombs. You and Coombs killed that boy.” “I didn’t kill him,” my father said, and shook his head back and forth, back and forth. “I just didn’t do anything to stop it.”

A breath came out of him that seemed as if it had been held inside for twenty years. He told me how he had run after Coombs and found him in the alley. Coombs’s hands were wrapped around Gerald Sikes’s throat. “I told you things were different then. Coombs wanted to teach him a little respect for the uniform. But he kept squeezing. ‘‘s got something,’ he told me. I shouted at him, ‘ go!’ When I realized it had gone too far, I went for him. Coombs laughed at me. ‘ is my territory Marty-boy. If you’re scared, get the fuck out of here.’ I didn’t know the kid was going to die… When Fallone came on the scene, Coombs let the kid drop and said, ‘ bastard was trying to pull a knife on me.’ Tom was a vet; he sized it up fast. Told me to get lost. Coombs laughed and said, ‘Go…’ No one ever disclosed my name.”

My eyes stung with tears. My heart felt as if it had a rip in it. “Oh, how could you? At least Coombs stood up. But
you
… you ran.

“I know I ran,” he said. “But I didn’t run the other night. I was there for you.”

I closed my eyes, then opened them again. “It’s truth time. You weren’t there for
me
. You were following
him
. That’s why you’re back here. Not to protect
me
… to protect yourself. You came back to kill Frank Coombs.”

My father’s face turned ashen. He ran his hand through his thick white hair. “Maybe at first.” He swallowed. “But not
now
… It changed, Lindsay.”