Gods Go Begging (47 page)

“As a good field chaplain should, he absolved Persephone and Mai of their few sins, sending them from this shattered place to the placid arms of God. Then, after his final amen and shalom, he kissed Mai’s face and neck, her beautiful face and neck, and began to whisper.

“ ‘Je suis ici, mon amour,’
”said Jesse, recalling the chaplain’s words as he had spoken them to the jury.

“
‘Estoy aquí. C’est moi, Vô Dahn.
Remember me? I am the one who is no one. If French were the universal tongue, my love; if only Oscar Peterson were really Oscar Fils de Pierre; if only there were Mexicans in space illegally dashing across Martian borders and Aztec soldiers in County Cork—then you would have a loving husband today, my dearest Cassandra. You would both be alive today.‘

“He touched the faces of the two women, closing their eyelids with his fingers. Before speaking his final words to them, he wondered, once again, what Mai had done since he left her in that small apartment in Hong Kong. After so many years, he had found his Vietnamese lover once again. He had always longed to see her, to touch her perfect skin. He had floated around her in recent years, swimming just out of sight, living just outside the perimeter of her life, wondering who she had become and how she had met the other Amazon woman.

“He kissed her one final time before running away. But as he ran, he resolved to perform a single act of mercy, a single act of violence.”

Jesse walked to the defense table and stood in front of his chair. He ended every closing argument at this spot. He turned to face Carolina.

“Like Abraham, he had heard the behest of heaven, but this time no angel would intercede. The third man, the ragged stranger, the army chaplain who testified before you, Carolina, and who so long ago abandoned his flock and his post on an anonymous hill in Vietnam, sobbed his final words to Mai before disappearing into the night: ‘You can love me less, but please love me forever.’

“Calvin Thibault is no soldier. There is too much humanity in him, and it is growing stronger each day. I asked the jury to set him free, Carolina, would you?”

Carolina nodded yes as he continued to speak. She would set him free.

“The brutal warrior in this case has already been punished. He shares the grim fate of his five victims. Little Reggie Harp was a creature of desire.”

Jesse walked back to Carolina and sat down even more weary than before.

“And when desire is stripped of humanity,” he said as his final words, “all that remains is war.”

On the third floor of the Hall of Justice, in a courtroom jammed with angry and saddened parents, Judge Steven Shaiken was in the process of sentencing defendant Jeremiah Bigelow, who had been convicted of thirty-four counts of child molestation.

“Quiet in the courtroom!” cried the bailiff in a vain attempt to intercept the scores of exclamations of grief, revenge, and rage that were flying across the courtroom and striking the back of the defen dant’s head. When silence fell there was a perfect grouping of invisible darts crowded into a cowlick bull‘s-eye.

“On court thirty-four,” said the judge wearily, “like all of the counts that preceded it, I find no reason to sentence you to the midterm, and given your past record and your cruel and heartless behavior in this case, I certainly find no reason at all to sentence you to the mitigated term. Therefore, you shall receive the aggravated term of eight years in prison for this the thirty-forth and final count. Now, sir, I think the arithmetic here is fairly straightforward. I never took algebra in high school, Mr. Bigelow, but I’ve got a feeling that some good, old-fashioned multiplication is all that’s needed here.”

One or two nervous laughs were quickly choked off in the audience of tearful parents and tiny victims. The judge adjusted his bifocals while he scribbled his computations on a sheet of yellow paper. At his desk below the bench, the clerk mimicked His Honor’s every move, including the snaking tongue that slid out of the left side of his mouth and wriggled with each phase of the computation.

Upon reaching a product, the judge retracted his tongue, sighed and drew a heavy line across the paper. Below the line was a single total. The clerk turned and whispered excitedly to the judge. The two were in agreement.

“Mr. Bigelow, the aggregate term that you must serve is two hundred and seventy-two years in state prison.”

A wave of applause grew from a tentative ripple into a tsunami that washed across the jury box and the defense table and drowned all decorum. Suddenly the defendant at the defense table began to quake with emotion, his shoulders heaving and his gray fingernails digging into the oak table where he had sat stoically for thirteen weeks of trial by jury. The defendant stood bolt upright. With his chest heaving he stared at the judge.

“Mr. Bigelow, I will now read your credit for time served into the record and then I will proceed to review your parole rights.”

“His parole officer’s grandfather hasn’t been born yet,” muttered the prosecutor smugly and almost beneath his breath.

Some parents of the victimized children began to laugh at the prosecutor’s remark, laughter that was a weak hybrid of relief and melancholy. The defendant had heard both the prosecutor’s remark and the derisive laughter in the audience behind him, and began to scream. His face turned beet red and his eyes welled with tears.

“You punish my desires,” he screamed while sobbing. “I can’t do that kind of time! You punish my desires! Two hundred and seventy-two years! I just can’t do that kind of time!”

Judge Shaiken’s face suddenly lost its official demeanor. Now an almost fatherly tenderness settled into his eyes as he removed his bifocals and looked down from the high bench into the tear-drowned eyes of the convicted man.

“Son,” he said softly, “the law of this land, in all of its wisdom, does not require that you do all of that time. Just do what you can, son. Just do what you can.”

Three floors below Jeremiah Bigelow, Jesse sat alone in the House of Toast. There was a cup of cold coffee in front of him that had a shiny film of rainbow-hued oil floating on its surface. Using a toothpick, Jesse was carefully probing the liquid in an effort to save a tiny gnat that had flown into the slick. He slowly lifted the gnat from the goo and set it down softly on a paper napkin that might serve to absorb the sludge. As he bent closer to watch the life-and-death struggle of the little insect, the table began to fill with lawyers. Like true defense attorneys, each new arrival at the table looked at the gnat and wondered if it could be saved.

“Jury’s out?” asked Newton, who already knew the answer to the question. “You can’t do anything about it now, man. All I want to know is: do you have a shot?”

Jesse nodded without looking up. Biscuit had a shot.

“Any requests for readback?”

It was the voice of Chris Gauger. Jesse shook his head.

“Not a peep,” said Jesse. “They slammed the door on that jury room and haven’t made a sound for five hours. They didn’t even ask to have the physical evidence.”

“They know what they’re gonna do,” added Matt Gonzalez, who was leaning over to see what Jesse was watching so closely. “Whatever the verdict is, they ain’t gonna wait three or four days to decide it. Is that some kinda mosquito?”

“No, it’s a gnat,” answered Jesse solemnly, “and I think he’s about to succumb to this coffee.”

Jesse tried to smile, but couldn’t. The pressure of the verdict wouldn’t let him. Calvin Thibault could die of old age in prison. It would be better than the death penalty, but not much better. Jesse looked around the table at his friends. They had come to support him, to distract him. Soon enough the stories would begin.

“I had this guy, just last week,” began Newton Lam, “a young punk Sureño—you know, one of those lost kids from the gangs down on Thirteenth Street. This kid had about as much of a future as a flightless pigeon in Chinatown. Anyway, he’s got this girlfriend, a cute little chulita named Dorothy Lopez.

“Now Dorothy goes to night school over at State and she gets this part-time job with a big architectural firm. They let her work around her class schedule and she could do her homework during her lunch hour. Our Dorothy is moving up.”

A groan traversed the full diameter of the table. Too many stories began this way. No one really wanted to hear the end of this tale, yet no one would leave while it was being told.

“She rents an apartment in the Richmond District and moves our boy in. She cooks for him, does his laundry, she even irons his gang clothing, Red shirts, red socks, even the guy’s underwear is red. She’s going places, and for some reason she wants to take the punk with her—God knows why—but our hero wasn’t going to better himself without a fight.”

“Women are like that.”

It was Freya, who had taken the seat next to Jesse’s.

“Anyway, the fool starts to beat her. He beats her when she gets good grades; he beats her when she uses a word that he’s never heard—which ends up being a whole lot of abuse. The day she finished a
New York Times
crossword puzzle, he almost killed her. He beat her for twenty minutes when she trimmed off all that long Mexicana hair and had it curled at a beauty parlor. But the last straw was a tiny leather miniskirt. When she put that little thing on to go off to work with all of those male architects, it sent
mi hombre
over the edge.

“So my man, ‘Wanderer’—that was his gang name, given to him because he once walked the five or six miles to Daly City, a legendary exploit in some circles—my man Wanderer pulled a gun and ordered her to quit school and to quit work and to move back to his Rancho Grande, his bitchin’ little house trailer parked behind Chewy’s Casa de Menudo.”

“Ah, young love,” sighed Freya. “What I wouldn’t give to wake up in the morning to the smell of raw tripe.”

“When she steadfastly refused to quit her job and her classes,” continued Newton, “the idiot shoots her twice, point-blank, in that beautiful, hopeful face.”

“Oh, God,” groaned Jesse, “did we really need to hear this story? It’s just tragedy—plain old run-of-the-mill, depthless, heartrending tragedy; beauty slaughtered by mindless, numbing stupidity. Where is the irony? How could this story ever hope to meet our table’s lofty standards of Olympic ignorance?”

Newton only smiled. The look on his face told everyone seated that there was more… more than just endless death for a lovely young woman and a life sentence served out in a room of frigid concrete and steel. There was more here than just the savage shattering of a promising future.

“After the defendant was sentenced for murder, I was stopped in the hallway by a small woman—a dark, very Indian-looking woman. It was the defendant’s mother. I had only seen her once, at the arraignment. She never attended a day of the trial. With four other kids, she couldn’t afford to. She stopped me by pulling on my sleeve as I was leaving the courtroom. I remember that I looked directly into her eyes. They seemed so filled with compassion and grief, but that was only my imagination.

“I took her small hands into my own and was about to offer her my deepest condolences when she spread her lips and spat a huge wad of spit into my face. I swear, she must’ve been saving up that sputum for a whole week. It took both sides of my handkerchief and one sleeve to wipe it off. Then she sneered at me and spoke a sentence I’ll never forget.”

The entire table had grown silent. Every lawyer sat poised to hear the woman’s words.

“ ‘There’s no justice,’ she shrieked. ‘I read about this guy over in Nevada—this man in Carson City—who kills a woman by shooting her twelve times, and he got twenty-five years to life, Mr. Lawyer. My boy only shot that little bitch two times and he gets the exact, same sentence! What kind of justice is that?’ ”

A muffled groan made its way around the table. There was no gesture, no human sound to adequately express what they felt. The groan was more like a silent prayer, a benediction for the dignity, the delusion, and the dolor of motherhood. In her mind her son should have received one-sixth the sentence of the man in Nevada, having used that fraction of bullets to do the job.

“I had this guy …”

It was Chris, starting another story in order to break the spell of sadness. As expected, the mood of the table changed the moment those four magical, incantatory words were spoken.

“I had this guy who was charged with bank robbery. He and his codefendant had been cellmates in Soledad Prison and had spent their nights trying to come up with an airtight, foolproof way to rob a bank. When they were released, they came to San Francisco to report to their parole agents and to put their magnificent plan into action.”

The table of lawyers settled into their chairs, enthralled by the endless possibilities that this scenario presented. There were newly filled cups of coffee on the table. Even the gnat on the napkin seemed to be listening as his wings dried. Above the insect, Jesse seemed to have forgotten about the twelve jurors that were, at that very moment, deciding the fate of his client.

“As part of their plan they bought a real junker, one of those big gas-guzzling Oldsmobiles. They bought a pistol, some ski masks, gloves, some magnets, and two sets of stolen California license plates. First they glued the license plates back to back so that all they would have to do to change plates is flip them over. They glued the magnets to the fenders, and the double-sided plates were held in place by the magnets. Pretty smart, eh?”

No one answered. If these guys were really smart, Chris would not be telling their story at this table. Everyone knew that the robbers had been caught—that was a given—but no one knew how it had happened and how the two suspects had ensured their own failure. Therein lay the tale.

“So, my boy is the wheel man. He gets in his car every day for two weeks and drives around the bank so many times that he can do it in his sleep. He knows that block: every parking space, every driveway, every rut in the road. He drives it in the daylight, he drives it at sunset. He drives around that block at two in the morning with no lights. Pretty soon he’s driving it with his eyes closed, counting out the seconds, stopping at stop signs and making the turns perfectly. My man was ready! This wasn’t going to be one of those amateurish, sloppy, drug-induced jobs that had landed him in prison four times.