Judgment Calls (6 page)

“I think so. Even if the case falls apart, I think Lopez would plead Derringer out to assault to avoid going to verdict on the attempted murder.”

“So what are you worrying about? Sounds to me like you saved the day just by getting involved, no matter what happens. This way, the police are still working on the case, so they might even catch the second guy. You need to look at it from that perspective. You may win. But even if you don’t, you haven’t really lost anything.”

She was right. I should feel good about what I did today. It was time to put aside the serious stuff and talk to her about the personal side of this case.

“Oh, and I may have neglected to fill you in on the identity of one of the main investigators.”

“Why would I care? Is he a cutey?” She feigned enthusiastic curiosity and gave me a wink.

“Um… No! Well, I mean, yeah. I don’t really know. Look, what I mean is that for once this man actually has something to do with me and not you.”

“Excuse me for assuming. I’ve gotten used to you never being interested. It’s been two years since your divorce, and you still act like men don’t get to you anymore, except… oh, lord, Sam, you’re not actually going to try working with Lucky Chucky, are you?”

It’s been more than fifteen years since Chuck Forbes’s football buddies had come up with that nickname. Two of them had barged into Chuck’s house carrying a keg one weekend when his parents were out of town. I guess we didn’t hear them over “Avalon.” For the rest of high school, Chuck was Lucky Chucky. They finally stopped calling me Been-laid Kincaid at the end of senior year.

“Can’t we move a little bit past that, Grace?”

“It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Chuck. It’s what’s wrong with the two of you. When are you going to realize that he makes you crazy? You either need to write each other off or lock yourselves in a room together until you get it out of your systems. You have this twisted love-hate, only-happy-when-you’re-not-getting-together kind of relationship. And every time you see him, you dwell on it for the next two weeks but won’t let yourself follow through. I am driven crazy by osmosis. Please don’t do this to me. Is that why you took this case?”

“Oh, please. No, I swear, Grace. I would’ve taken it anyway, for all the reasons we talked about. But I don’t know how I’m going to handle this. Just reading the police reports, I find myself poring over every word of his, admiring what a good cop he’s become. I guess I’m just going to have to deal with it.”

“Deal with it? You’ve only ever had one way of dealing with Chuck Forbes. You decide you can keep the relationship platonic. You start hanging out, kidding around, watching games on the weekends, all the things that friends do. But then the chemistry kicks in and the next thing you know you get scared and back off, he gets mad, and you both go off into your separate corners and pout until you once again trick yourselves into believing that you can make the friendship thing work and the whole damn cycle begins again. Did it ever dawn on you that Roger might have felt a little left out?”

I stared at her. Roger’s my ex-husband. We met at Stan ford Law School. Dad thought Roger was too much of a blue blood but Mom and I thought he was perfect: a grownup who knew what he wanted and how he was going to get it. Smart, good-looking, and ambitious, Roger had wanted to marry me right out of law school so we could start our perfect life together back in New York. We moved into the Upper East Side apartment his family bought us as a wedding present, him working toward partnership at one of the country’s biggest firms, me working as an Assistant U.S. Attorney.

The perfect life didn’t last long. Roger landed a job as in-house counsel with Nike, so we wound up moving to Portland after only a couple of years in New York. A few months later, I discovered that my husband had taken literally his new employer’s ad slogan encouraging decisive, spontaneous, self-satisfying action. We both thought I would be working late preparing for a trial set to start the following day, but the case had settled with a last-minute guilty plea. My intention was to surprise Roger by coming home early with dinner and a movie in hand.

Instead, I found him doing it with a professional volleyball player on top of our dining room table. I got the house and everything in it, but I made sure he got the table.

Now Grace and I rarely referred to my former husband as anything other than Shoe Boy or for any reason other than comic. We definitely never insinuated that I was somehow responsible for his infidelities.

“That’s totally unfair, Grace. You know that Chuck and I have been nothing more than friends since I came back to town. Unlike some people, I took my marriage vows seriously.”

“Come on, Sam. I’m not saying Roger was justified to whore around. I’m just saying he might have been bothered when you and Chuck started spending time together again. Roger thought leaving New York was going to change things, but you were still putting in the same kind of hours and running thirty miles a week. Then you started making time for Chuck. Say what you want about only being friends, but to Roger it was more than that, even if you weren’t technically cheating. He had to have seen the chemistry; everyone does. You drop that hard-ass force field of yours with me and with Chuck, but you never dropped it with Roger. And if he was bothered by it, the next guy will be too. So, unless you want to be alone for good, you need to decide where Chuck Forbes fits into your life. You’re not in high school anymore, honey.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You pissed?” she asked.

“No, just surprised.”

“I know. I get sucked in by you two also, but I worry about you, is all. This isn’t college, when you could sleep with Chuck on breaks and then run back to Cambridge. Make sure you know what you’re doing.” She smiled. “Don’t get me wrong. I have noticed how good he looks in that uniform of his.”

I returned the smile and said, “At least I’m not writing Mrs. Charles Landon Forbes, Jr.” in my notebook anymore.”

We quickly changed the subject, but the conversation nagged at me throughout the rest of the meal. Roger used to accuse me of being ambivalent about our relationship; now Grace was suggesting the same thing about my feelings for Chuck. The way I’d always seen it, my job was hard enough; the personal stuff should take care of itself.

Three.

Work returned to a normal pace the next day.

I had left several messages on Andrea Martin’s machine the day before but hadn’t heard back from her. This morning, she picked up.

“Ms. Martin, my name is Samantha Kincaid. I’m a deputy district attorney for Multnomah County. How are you?”

“Could be better, under the circumstances and all.”

“I left a few messages for you yesterday,” I said.

“Yeah, I didn’t get ‘em till late. I wait tables at the Hot-cake House at night. I was planning on trying to call you back later.”

“My understanding is that the police have talked to you about what happened over the weekend. Is that right?”

“Yeah. One of ‘em, Mike somebody, called me in the middle of the night Saturday. Told me Kendra was in the hospital. I’d just gotten off work, but I would’ve come down anyway. I guess Kendra didn’t want me there, though.”

“Where is Kendra now?”

“I think she’s in her room. I’m just heading out for my day job at Safeway.”

“Did you know where Kendra was on Saturday night when this happened?”

“No. She runs away so much I’ve stopped calling the cops on her. She just gets mad at me when they pick her up. I’m to the point I just want her to come home every night. I figure I got a better chance if I give her her freedom. The other way sure wasn’t working.”

“So she came home on Sunday afternoon then?”

“Yeah. She didn’t want to. I don’t know what’s so bad around here that she’d rather be out on the street. But the hospital wouldn’t let her go unless she came here or agreed to foster care. At least she picked here.”

“She’s been through a lot. She might want your help right now.”

She laughed. “Miss… what’d you say your name was again?”

“Samantha Kincaid. Call me Samantha.”

“Well, you obviously don’t know my daughter. She don’t want help from no one. Always been that way, too. It’s like she decided when she turned ten or something that she was grown.”

“Did Detective Calabrese explain what Kendra’s lifestyle has been while she was on the street?”

“I wouldn’t call it much of a lifestyle. But, yeah. That guy and his partner a blond guy, real young came by the Safeway on Sunday to break the news to me. They told me Saturday night she was assaulted. Guess they wanted to say the other stuff in person.”

They probably wanted to watch her response. Kids who run away are often the victims of abuse by their parents. If anything would set a parent off, it would be learning that their kid has been shooting up and turning tricks. They wanted to make sure she didn’t seem the type to take her anger out on Kendra physically.

“How has Kendra been doing since she’s been home?”

“Alright, I guess. Like I said, she don’t really talk to me.”

“Well, I was calling mainly to introduce myself and to let you know I’m handling the case. The police have arrested one of the suspects. His name is Frank Derringer. He’s in jail for now, but we have to take the case to a grand jury within a week, and Kendra’s going to need to testify for that. I’ve got it scheduled for Friday. Assuming the grand jury indicts Derringer, the court will schedule the case for trial. Most cases don’t actually go to trial, but if this one does, it will probably be in a couple of months and Kendra will need to testify. Do you have any questions for me?”

“Do you know when the cops are going to give Kendra her stuff back? Her keys were in her purse, and I don’t know whether to get a new set cut.”

“I’m not really sure, Ms. Martin. It can take the crime lab a few weeks sometimes to finish working on evidence. Depending on what they find, we may need to keep the evidence sealed for trial. I can find out about her keys for you, if you’d like.”

“Whatever. I can get a new set cut at the store tomorrow. Am I going to have to come to any of these things? I can’t afford to take time off work.”

“You’re certainly welcome to come with Kendra as support, but I don’t think you’ll need to testify until the trial. I’ll make sure Kendra has transportation to the courthouse when she needs to come down here.”

“Alright, then. I better be going. You need anything else?”

“Would it be OK if I dropped by your home tonight to meet Kendra?” I asked.

“You’ll have to talk to her about that. You want me to get her?”

“No, that’s OK, I’ll try talking to her later.” If Mom didn’t care, I’d rather just drop in on Kendra unannounced. Wouldn’t want her running off anywhere. “Feel free to call me if you have any questions. Let me give you my direct line.”

“Um, I can’t find a pen right now. If I need anything, I can look it up, right?”

I told her that she could, even though I knew she wouldn’t.

I devoted the rest of my day to the routine drudgeries of the drug section of the Drug and Vice Division. The DA assigned me to DVD because I used to prosecute drug cases when I was in New York. I accepted the assignment because I wanted to keep working as a prosecutor when Roger and I moved, and the Portland U.S. Attorney’s Office wasn’t hiring. In most people’s eyes it was a step down: I went from handling cases involving nationwide distribution conspiracies and literally tons of dope to prosecuting sad-sack hustlers for dealing eight-balls of methamphetamine and as little as a single rock of crack cocaine.

But while I may have lost the prestige of a federal prosecutor’s office, I had developed a niche as part of the vice section of DVD, prosecuting the monsters who lure, coerce, and force women into prostitution. The less-experienced DVD attorneys shied away from those cases because they were hard to prove, hard to win, and hard to take. The career prosecutors who handled the major felony person crimes didn’t want them because they were viewed as less important than murders and other violent offenses. But I felt more rewarded by those cases than I’d ever felt prosecuting even complex federal drug conspiracies.

Today, however, my plate was full of drug charges. No surprise, the grand jury returned indictments on all four of the cases I presented. Most drug-related cases are pretty much the same. The only variation tends to be in the type and degree of stupidity involved.

Usually it was a matter of poor strategy. My daily caseload is full of tweekers who agree to let the police search them, even though they’re carrying enough dope to land them in the state pen for a couple of years. Apparently, an undocumented side effect of dope is a gross overestimation of one’s own intelligence. Dopers become convinced they’ve hidden their stash so well a cop won’t find it. They’re always wrong.

But sometimes it goes beyond poor strategy to straight-out stupidity. In one of today’s cases, two men did a hand-to-hand drug deal standing two feet from a Portland police officer. What stealth tactic had this shrewd officer used to avoid detection? He was part of the city’s mounted patrol unit, which covered a downtown beat on horseback. When the men were arrested, one of them said to the officer, “Dude, I didn’t even see you up there, man. I just thought it was cool that a horse had found its way to the park.” It hadn’t dawned on them to look up and see whether someone might have accompanied the savvy equine.

Despite all the talk about the modern “war on drugs,” the truth is that most police don’t go out of their way to investigate minor drug offenses. They don’t have to. There is so much dope out there, and the people taking it are so dense, that the cases literally fall into the cops’ laps, whether they want them or not. The upside is that it makes my job easier.

When I was done getting my cases indicted, I called MCT to see if a detective could drive out to Rockwood with me to interview Kendra. I wanted to talk to her tonight, before she got antsy and ran away again. Grand jury was Friday, and I needed to know what to expect from my star witness.

I try to have a police officer or DA investigator with me whenever I talk to someone who will be testifying in one of my cases. If the witness ever went south on me, I’d want a person present who could testify about the witness’s statement, since lawyers are not allowed to testify in their own cases.