Judgment Calls (20 page)

As Tommy described it, Haley’s loitering pop was pretty typical. Time of day, red-light neighborhood, flagging down cars with men in them. It was usually enough.

“She saying anything?” I asked.

“Nope. She’s making it real clear that it’s nothing new and she knows the only thing that’s going to happen to her is mandatory counseling that she’ll never attend and assignment to a foster home that she’ll immediately run away from.”

“I don’t see a lot we can do then, Tommy.”

“Agreed. I only called you because she brought up your name. As tough as she’s playing, I think she’d like to get out of it if she could do it without any work on her part. She told me Kendra said the female DA on her case was alright, and that if we had told her that day in February that you were a friend of Kendra, she might not have been such a bitch.”

“Did she say when she talked to Kendra?” I asked.

“Not exactly, but it sounded recent.” I knew I shouldn’t have believed Kendra when she said she hadn’t been staying in touch with Haley. “Anyway, since she brought up your name and is apparently hanging with your vie again, I thought I should call you. You want me to cut her loose?”

I thought about it. It would do Kendra some good to see the consequences of the life she’d left behind. “Screw her. Unless she’s willing to give us something useful for vice, put the case through.”

“I figured as much but thought it was your call. I’ll give her my card and tell her to call me if she wants to share any info?”

“Go ahead, but I don’t see it happening.”

I had a hard time falling back asleep.

Nine.

The next day of trial continued uneventfully. Things move along surprisingly smoothly when the defense never objects or cross-examines your witnesses. Lisa’s silence initially made me nervous, because I suspected she was reserving the hardball for Kendra. I was wrong, though.

After Jack Walker’s testimony, Kendra took the stand and walked the jury through her life story. Two female jurors wiped away tears when Kendra talked about what Derringer had done to her.

To my surprise, Lisa took the high road on cross. She didn’t roll over, but she didn’t rip Kendra apart, either.

The entirety of Lisa’s cross focused on Kendra’s heroin use; she did not discuss prostitution activity at all. And even her questions about the drugs did not seem like a character attack. Instead, she zeroed in on the effects that heroin may have had upon Kendra’s perceptions that night. Even I had to admit that her questions were fair.

After Kendra testified, I called Andrea Martin to the stand, primarily to humanize Kendra by showing the jury that she had a mother. Her testimony, which was limited to Kendra’s recovery, was uncontroversial, and Lisa didn’t cross-examine her. Andrea had to leave for work once she left the stand, but Kendra stayed for the rest of the day.

Pleased that Kendra had testified with relatively minor trauma, Chuck, Grace, and I took her to the Spaghetti Factory for dinner right after court got out. Nothing tops a hard day’s work like a big plate of carbs followed by spumoni ice cream.

Most of the dinner conversation focused on the trial. Kendra wanted to know how I thought it was going and what it meant that Lopez hadn’t been tougher on her. I tried not to get her hopes up, explaining that the defense attorney appeared to be going through the motions so that Derringer got a fair trial. I didn’t voice my growing anxiety that Lopez was hiding something up her sleeve.

“Well, I don’t think there’s anything fair about it. He gets to sit there and glare at me while I have to talk to a bunch of old people I don’t know about what he did. It was really embarrassing for me, and then he doesn’t have to get up there at all. He just gets his fair trial? What about mine?”

I wasn’t going to try to defend the system on this one. “You’re right, kiddo. The rules aren’t always fair. But you’re playing by them, and I think things are going well. You did a great job today. I think those old people who don’t know you did know that you were telling the truth.”

Kendra held my eye for a moment, but then turned her attention to playing with her water glass. I was grateful when the waiter broke the awkward silence to top off our coffees.

When he left, the silence returned, and Grace invited Kendra out to the dock behind the Spaghetti Factory to look at boats. I considered proposing that I take Kendra instead; I’d been wavering about whether to broach the subject of her renewed contact with Haley Jameson, despite my warning.

I thought better of it, remembering the summer that our fathers forbade Grace and me from hanging around the school who recake Left to our own devices, we would have tired of her in a couple of weeks. But parental pressure backed us into a corner and we were stuck with helium heels for months. Plus, right now Kendra saw me as part of a system that was treating her unfairly. A walk with Grace could be just what she needed.

So I let my opportunity to talk to Kendra alone slip by and volunteered to wait around for the bill. Chuck offered to keep me company.

Once Grace and Kendra were out of earshot, he spoke up. “Hey, something came up at work today, and I wanted you to hear it from me and not from the news. It’s probably nothing, but I know what the media are going to do with it. And that’s going to bring up some stuff that’s been bothering me already.”

“Just tell me. What is it?”

“I guess the Oregonian received an anonymous letter today from someone trying to exonerate Landry and Taylor. Whoever wrote it claimed to have killed Jamie Zimmerman.”

“Jesus. Where the hell’s that coming from?”

“Some crackpot. Who knows? Could just be someone who wants attention, like those people who turn up and claim to be serial killers. Given the politics around here, it could be some nut job against the death penalty. Someone trying to make a point, now that it looks like the state might actually move on some of these death sentences. All I know is it’s bullshit.”

“And I think people will see it the same way. It’s going to take a lot more than some anonymous letter to a newspaper to reverse those convictions.”

“Honestly? I’m not even worried about the conviction. I went through this crap already a few years ago. Landry’s attorney tried to make me out to be some rough rider, framing an innocent old lady to help my own career. It made me sick to my stomach when the best way to make the case was for that prick O’Donnell to argue to the jury that I didn’t need to frame people, I could just milk my daddy’s name to the top of the department.”

I had never considered how rough the publicity from the Zimmerman case must have been on Chuck. And now it looked as if he was going to have to go through it all over again.

“I assume the department’s investigating the letter?”

“Yeah, at the highest levels. The Chief met with your boss today, and they decided to assign Walker and Johnson, since they know the details of the original Zimmerman case. But Mike and I are off.”

“I’m afraid to ask why.”

“Like you need to ask why, Sam? Shit!” A family next to us turned their heads at the noise of Chuck’s raised voice and his slap against the tabletop. He nodded at them and tried to whisper. “They obviously think that if anything went wrong in that investigation, it had to do with me. And Mike’s my partner. So we’re off, and I’m going to be the center of everybody’s fucking conspiracy theory again.”

There were actually good reasons for segregating Chuck from the investigation, even if the DA and the Chief were convinced as I was sure they were of the truth. But, for the second time tonight, I thought better of trying to defend the way things sometimes work.

“Chuck, I’m so sorry. Look, you know Ray and Jack are on your side here. They are not going to set you up. You know how much they believe in that case. Remember? I thought Walker was going to climax talking about Taylor’s lethal injection.”

I smiled, and Chuck shared it with me. “No, you’re right. If they were trying to fuck me, they’d assign IA to it or bring in the Justice Department. Yeah, Walker and Johnson will handle it right.”

It was quiet for a while. “Man, Sam, I’ve been stewing about this for hours, and you manage to calm me down. How do you do that?”

“You give me too much credit. You’re not taking into account all those times when I’m the one who can rile you up like no one else.”

I paid the bill, and we went out to meet Grace and Kendra. “OK, guys, it’s probably time we called it a night.” I put my arm around Kendra. “This chi ca got school mafiana.”

She didn’t look too happy about that one. But we finally managed to get her into Grace’s car. Once again, Grace was a lifesaver. The last thing I needed was an hour-long car ride.

Chuck and I made small talk about Kendra while he walked me to my car. I could tell he wasn’t ready to be alone,

so it didn’t surprise me when he asked if I wanted to catch a movie.

I looked at my watch. “Can’t. Vinnie awaits, you know. Piss him off, and he seems to forget about his doggy door. Never know what I might find on my rugs.”

I think he actually tried to hide his disappointment, but he looked worse than Vinnie does when I take away his Gumby baby. I caved.

“Why don’t we rent something? Vinnie’d probably like to see you. But I get to pick.”

He countered with his own conditions. “No subtitles. No cartoons.”

Hard bargain, but it was a deal.

A warning to the wise. Don’t rent one of those friends-who-fall-in-love movies with an old lover you’ve sworn off as just a friend. Around the time Harry asked Sally if she wanted to partake of a piece of pecan pie, I made the mistake of pointing out that the film’s only flaw was how implausible it was that they didn’t figure out earlier that they belonged together.

“Yeah?” Chuck said. “Well, take a look at us. Some people might say that we should’ve figured out a few things ourselves by now.”

It was the first time either of us had ever acknowledged out loud the potential to be more than friends again. I might like directness in every other aspect of my life, but I didn’t think I liked it in this context.

“No mistakes here. We were made to have a beautiful friendship,” I said with my best Bogart impersonation.

“Nope, not this time, Sam. Whenever I move a little closer to you, you pull out something goofy to help you scoot away. Cut it out with the Casablanca. I’m serious about this.”

“Well, maybe you missed your chance to be serious. If you were serious, and you thought we were meant to be together, you wouldn’t have dumped me.”

He laughed out of exasperation. “Sam, we were kids back then. And I didn’t want to dump you, as you put it. But I also didn’t want to move down to California to learn how to be some corporate drone.”

“Then you could’ve come with me and done something else,” I said. I stood up and started heading toward the kitchen, but he took my arm and pulled me back down.

“You wouldn’t have been happy, Sam. You had this idea in your head about what your life should look like, and back then I just didn’t fit into it.”

“Well, what makes you think you’d fit into it now? Maybe you’d start to feel like I was trying to change you again, and we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?”

“I’d fit in, Sam, because you don’t want to change me. We like each other just the way we are. The problem has been that you won’t admit it. You won’t accept that you like everything about me.”

“Including your modesty?” I said, trying to laugh.

“Be serious for just a moment, OK, Sam? You know I match every part of that conflicted personality of yours. You like that I have this crazy job. You like that part of me is still a big kid. And you’ll never admit it, but you love that I do what I want, even when it meant letting you down.”

This time, when I stood, he let me. I went into the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and sat down at the table.

He came in after a few minutes. “When you found out your mother had breast cancer, you came to me, not Roger. And, today, when I heard about the letter to the paper, you were the one I wanted to talk to. We don’t have to work out everything in our history and our future right now. But don’t pretend you haven’t thought about this, Sam. I’ll go if that’s what you want, but I really do need you tonight.”

It wasn’t until the door closed that I realized I didn’t want him to leave yet. And that it was important enough that I was willing to figure out the rest of it later.

He was still on my front steps when I opened the door. He came back in, and we didn’t talk again for the rest of the night.

Given my long-standing commitment to keeping things with Chuck platonic, I would have expected larger repercussions from the night’s activities. But the sky didn’t fall, lightning didn’t strike, and I didn’t even regret it in the morning.

The truth was, I hadn’t felt that good for months. Whether it was just the aftereflects of the great sex remained to be seen.

And it had apparently taken Chuck’s mind off the Taylor investigation. He hadn’t even watched the local news before we went to sleep.

Unfortunately, reality set back in quickly. While I scurried around the house picking up the various items of clothing strewn on the path between the front door and my bed, Chuck grabbed the Oregonian from the porch.

The story about the anonymous letter was a long one and had made the front page of the Metro section. Putting aside my outrage that the press had gone forward on the basis on a single anonymous unconfirmed letter, I could acknowledge that the story was actually fair. It raised the possibility that

Taylor and Landry were innocent, but it also quoted experienced criminal investigators who were familiar with the common phenomenon of false confessions in high-profile cases. Some even suggested it might be a publicity stunt by a death-penalty opponent.

Although the paper did not reprint the letter itself, I was surprised by the amount of detail revealed about the letter’s contents. The typewritten letter was mailed from Roseburg, a logging town a couple of hours south of Portland. According to the report, the letter described with dispassion the grizzly details of the final hours of Jamie Zimmerman’s life and her horrible death. Its anonymous author claimed to have been playing pool at Tommy Z’s when he saw Jamie Zimmerman running her tongue across her parted lips, watching him while she did a nasty dance in front of the jukebox. She made it clear what she wanted when she graphically simulated fellatio on the last of many bottles of Rolling Rock he bought her.