Salvation Boulevard (41 page)

“Plowright arrives. But with a surprise: Jerry Hobson. Hobson says that you're blackmailing bastards, and he won't stand for it, pulls his gun to arrest you. He's head of security; that's his job. It's their property, their place of business. You're illegal intruders. He's certainly entitled to restrain you. If you do something threatening, he's entitled to kill you.

“You panic, or go crazy, or whatever, and you pull your gun and shoot him.

“You were there to commit another crime. That makes it felony murder. No need to prove intent. No need to prove that you went there to kill him.

“They can dress it up too. Bad blood between you and Hobson from your days on the force, when you were a corrupt cop and a drunk and he was your supervisor and tried to discipline you.

“You still have your two witnesses. One is your wife, so we discount her supporting statements.

“What about Miss Chandler?

“If I were the ADA, I'd bring her in, scare her with a particularly foul and repulsive interrogation room and whatever other tricks I usually use. Then I'd explain the law to her in regard to felony murder. If a murder takes place during the commission of a crime—in this case the breaking and entering and the blackmail—then all the participants in
that crime can be charged with murder. Then I would give her a choice: get charged with murder and do seven to ten, or change her story about how she had conspired with you to blackmail Plowright, and in return, she'll do eighteen months, minimum security. Or even just get probation and counseling.

“Now I have a choice.

“Do I want a show trial with lots of TV face time, or do I want you to cop a plea? A trial's always a risk. I could lose. But it's a risk for you too. You could end up with life. So maybe I decide to go with the sure thing. And I have a big bargaining chip. Your wife. If you take the plea, I let her walk. If you go to trial, so does she. You're the kind of guy who would go to prison to protect your wife, aren't you?”

Paul Plowright was in a coma.

A blood vessel had broken in his brain. Nobody knew if he would live or die. The longer it took for him to come out, the closer he would be to a vegetable.

All the congregation's prayers were with him, as were those of millions in his viewing audience, in addition to special prayers being led by other preachers and televangelists. If he recovered, they would all take credit for the prayers that produced the miracle. If he ended up like Terry Schiavo, they would pray some more. If he died, nobody would take that as a sign that prayers don't work.

If he woke up, and if the powers that be decided to believe my version of events, then he would be charged with a wide ranging assortment of crimes.

If he then went to trial instead of cutting a deal, holy hell would break loose.

It wasn't just about Plowright. It touched the governor, the city police, the warden at the state penitentiary, the DA's office, and the whole Christian community. And if you have police who can do things in secret, how can you ever be sure there aren't fake cops doing the same things under cover of the same secrecy? Or real cops doing the wrong things with no way to make them accountable?

“What are your goals here?” Max asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“Personally,” Max said, “I was a lukewarm Catholic. Now I'm a lukewarm lapsed Catholic. But some of my friends are angry lapsed Catholics, and they cheer every time an altar boy wins a million-dollar lawsuit. Is it important to you to tell the world that they're hypocrites and criminals, that the whole thing is a big lie? Do you want to tear the temple down?”

“You don't understand,” I said, frustrated, even angry. No one seemed to understand. Maybe because I didn't really understand it myself. “I was lost,” I said. “Then Jesus saved me. Through Paul Plowright. It is not that I believed in him; it's that he believed in me. I was drunk when I went down that aisle. I was worthless. But not to Paul Plowright. To him, I was worth saving.”

“I'm not the only one,” I said. “And I'm not the last one.

“Maybe it's a lie. All of it. But . . . I don't know how to say this because . . . I guess because I don't understand it. Even though it's not true, it is true. It's false, but it saves people.

“If you take it away, what's going to replace it? Philosophy 101? Prozac?

“And that's not all. Most of the people there, they're good people. They were my friends. You think I want to tear their world down?”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Do you want to make money?”

“How so?”

“Go after CTM with a civil suit?”

“I don't know.”

“I saw a little glimmer of attention there. Everybody wants money.”

“Not like that,” I said.

“Well, put the thought in your back pocket. If you decide later, let me know. We'd be happy to handle it, no money down. We take thirty percent of the gross. I think Nicole Chandler wants to sue. Which is good for us because that'll help keep her on the side of the angels, or antiangels, or whatever we are in this one.”

“Let's get through this first,” I said.

“Do you have a political agenda? Want to tell the truth about corruption and for the perversion of justice to come out?”

“Max, I don't understand how this matters.”

“If you did, I'd try to find someone who has it in for the governor or Plowright and offer you up as a star witness in return for immunity for everything, and you could spend several years helping them make cases.

“If you wanted to go after CTM and the whole Christian thing, we would talk about going to trial. Get you on the stand, tell your story, find Plowright's other girls, everything we could get hold of. Every day a new surprise, a new scandal. There's a chance we might not win, but you'd have the bully pulpit.”

“Max,” I said, “I just want to get out of this clean. I did the right thing. It was justifiable homicide, and I want the record to say so.”

“Fine,” he said.

He looked at his notes.

“Fine,” he said again. “Here's our strategy.

“Of the seven judges this could get assigned to, three are born-again. The others are a Methodist, two Catholics, and a Jew, a devout one as it happens.

“Let's assume the jury pool is the same as the general population. That means eighty percent or more believe in God, seventy-three percent believe in miracles, seventy percent believe Jesus is the Son of God, and sixty percent believe in the Devil. A certain number of jurors will want to serve so they can act in defense of Jesus. They'll be quite happy to lie about that. They may even get coached on how to mask it because, after all, they'll be serving a higher master than the law.

“We do not want to bring your case to trial.

“We want the grand jury to no bill it.

“Which, as we have discussed, means we want the DA to want the grand jury to kick it. Which is easy, if it's what he wants. He brings in
you, Gwen, and Nicole as his only witnesses. You tell it like you told it to me, clean and simple; it's clear-cut self-defense.

“We have to convince him that it does him more harm than good to bring you to trial. And that the good things he might be hoping for by putting away the man who shot someone at one of our great religious institutions, he can get somewhere else. Make Hobson the scapegoat or indict Plowright, even though he's in a coma. We'll guide him to that.”

“There's one more thing,” I said.

“What? I just made a terrific speech, laid out a great strategy. I have it all figured out, and you want to throw in one more thing?”

He was joking, but he wasn't joking.

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Ahmad Nazami. I made a promise to Manny. All this, it was for nothing, including his death, if I don't get Ahmad Nazami out.”

Ahmad Nazami was still being held. The DA hadn't decided what to do yet.

Once prosecutors have somebody, they hate like hell to let go. When somebody they've convicted years before asks to go back and check the evidence for DNA, you would think, if they were neutral parties interested in justice, they'd say great, if the guy was guilty, we'll have proved it twice; if not, let's get him out and find the right person. But they don't. They fight tooth and nail to prevent the tests from taking place.

The good news was that Max agreed to pick up where Manny left off, pro bono.

He resumed Manny's demand for discovery, which had never been met. He wanted the full police crime report, all lab and ballistics work, and the confession. The confession that the defense had never seen. He wanted the name of the police officer who claimed to have taken it. He also obtained a subpoena for flight records in the area. It was information I had asked for but not received.

 

After three days of going over what happened, Max said, “There is one thing. Ms. Mansfield-Pellita, Teresa, that's the full name, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you seen her since?”

“No.”

“Spoken with her?”

“No. She called me a couple of times. But I haven't gotten back to her.”

“I don't want to be insulting. I think you've been pretty straight with me. In fact, you're kind of a hero to me, but the only thing that doesn't quite ring true is the description of your relationship.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? I mean if you want to maintain that you were never intimate with her, I'll respect that. But from what you say, she's very intense and acts on her emotions. So, my advice is that you get back to her. Talk to her. Make sure you're both on the same page. You know what I mean? That she doesn't feel scorned or abused. I don't mean go have an affair with her. I mean find a nice public place and have a nice quiet talk. Don't suborn perjury—you know I'm opposed to that—but make sure she's not going to make you look like a liar.”

I spent as much time with Angie as I could. I wanted her to understand. Most communication between a parent and child, in my experience, is about giving orders, then checking up to make sure they're being followed. To do that, parents keep up a front about an orderly world of authority figures and followers. Certainly, in my own case, I had never spent much time telling my daughter my troubles, my thoughts, my doubts.

Now I did. Perhaps because I had wandered from the geometric city of answers into the wilderness of questions. Most of us do end up, at least for a time, in a place where the roads run out and the signs that post the standard directions point the wrong way. She needed to have some idea of how to navigate if she ever found herself there.

 

Nicole Chandler was a mess.

Sometimes she was withdrawn and completely noncommunicative. Other times she was almost manic. She was dead set on suing, both to get revenge and to make millions and millions of dollars.

Max got her into therapy. It was going to look good for her lawsuit, but I don't know if it helped. She was calling me all the time. Often in the middle of night, to talk, for company, to soothe and reassure her. The night she'd let me lead her out of Plowright's
apartment, she assigned me a role in her mind, and sex was her way of making certain that I would be the person she needed me to be. So, along with all the fear and neediness, or because of it, she was flirty and seductive.

Gwen picked up on it, and it upset her.

Even though Max was urging me to be attentive to Nicole because I seemed to be the only one who could calm her down, and she needed to be in control of herself both for my case and her own lawsuit, I put Gwen first and stopped taking her calls.

Nicole stood that for one day, then swallowed half a bottle of the pills that the therapist had prescribed for her, phoned me again, and announced on the answering machine what she'd done. I called EMS, then rushed to the ER to make sure she was still alive.

It was very manipulative. By responding, I was enabling her. I understood all that. But testimony from a live witness who has been enabled is more convincing than the silence of one who's been tough-loved to death.

Holding her hand was a short-term solution for other people's immediate goals, mine and Max's. Nicole had been betrayed and abused. She blamed herself and Plowright and almost anyone else who came into her mind. Anger, pain, desperation, and sex are a bad combination. She was a danger to herself and others. Mostly to herself. Would she find salvation in time? Through therapy, a support group, medication?

She certainly couldn't turn to Jesus anymore.

 

Max met with District Attorney Roy Lathrop over drinks at the Cattleman's House.

Lathrop had been in office for ten years, two and a half terms.

They started out with some small talk. The chances of USW's basketball team, the Gila Monsters. Max had played for the Monsters, second string, but he'd played. They weren't all that good then, and, they agreed, they weren't much better now. Who they knew in common. Some local politics. Some national politics, which normally
Max would have stayed away from, but he wanted to tsk-tsk over the spectacle of the U.S. attorney general's having to say, over and over, that he didn't know what was going on in his own department.

Roy said, “Let's cut to the chase. What do you want here? You want a plea? Or what?”

“Since you ask, I want the grand jury to no bill my client.”

“I can't . . . ”

“Come on, Roy. Three solid witnesses say it was justifiable homicide. And there's nobody to say different. Whoever's presenting would have to work pretty damn hard to overcome that.”