Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (28 page)

I sat beside Loren in my street clothes, which he was kind enough to have sent in earlier that morning. He explained that the street clothes were a risky move: he wanted the court to see me at my nominal best, but he didn’t want Sewell to think I assumed I’d be walking into the late April sunshine of Orange County in a matter of minutes. I had shaved and combed my hair, which was still wet from the dribble of water from my protective custody faucet.

He slipped the
Times
and
Register
morning editions onto the table before me and I scanned the headlines, both quite large:

               
Sheriff Deputy Named In

               
Sex-With-Minors

               
Charge

and

          
Crimes Against Children Cop

          
To Be Charged As Molester

“This is hard to look at,” I whispered to Loren.

“That’s just the breeze,” he said. “Here’s the wind.”

He slid the papers back into his briefcase, then set down our copy of the complaint. I read through the list of witnesses to be called against me:

Joe Reilly, Director, Orange County Sheriff Department Forensic Laboratory

Karl Neelson, Deputy Director, Orange County Sheriff Department Forensic Laboratory

Margo Fixx, Assistant Director, Orange County Sheriff Department Forensic Laboratory

Lieutenant Jordan Ishmael, Orange County Sheriff Department

Deputy Alonzo Arriaga

Deputy Edward Reston

Deputy Frances White

Timothy Monaghan, Special Agent F.B.I., Washington, D.C.

Laurie Mize, Special Agent F.B.L, Washington, D.C

Alton Allen Sharpe

Caryn Lynn Sharpe

Linda Elizabeth Sharpe

Melinda Ellen Vickers

Penelope Anne Ishmael

I think my breath was short by then.

I know it was by the time I read the items listed in search warrants for my home and workplace:

Hair specimen

Fiber specimen, clothing, carpet

Soils specimen

Floorboard fiber specimen, vehicle(s)

Shirt, plaid flannel

Shirt, plaid cotton (blue)

Shirt, white cotton T

Pants, cotton twill (beige)

Pants, cotton denim (blue)

Socks, blend (navy)

Socks, cotton (white)

Shoes, leather chukka (suede)

I entered the haze again. Still within it, I looked behind me to see Donna Mason—and a million other faces—sizing my neck for the guillotine. Jordan Ishmael stood beside her with a fawning smile on his
GQ
face. Rick Zant was chatting with the KFWB and KNX reporters. Inside my ears there was a roar, then a silence, then the roar again.

I looked back down at the complaint.

The voice of the docket clerk rang out as Judge Sewell entered his courtroom and took his seat behind the bench. I stood on invisible legs and watched with fogged, uncertain eyes.

A moment later the clerk spoke again:

“Criminal Case 97-1103.”

I walked to the podium, Loren on my right. I was dimly aware of our path converging with that of Rick Zant and Victoria Espinoza, a young deputy prosecutor. We met, loosely, in front of the bench. When I looked up at the Honorable Lewis Sewell, he was already looking down at me, with an oddly dispassionate expression. He nodded and said hello, Terry. I said hello, Your Honor, back. When I looked over at Zant, he caught my gaze with a piercingly anonymous stare, then smiled up at the judge.

“Counsel,” said Sewell, “please identify yourselves for the record.”

Zant took a half step to the side and said, in his sonorous courtroom voice, “Your Honor, Richard Zant for the People of the State. With me is Victoria Espinoza, deputy district attorney.”

Loren said, rather quietly, “Loren Runnels for the defendant, Terry Naughton, Your Honor. We request leave, Your Honor, to file our appearance.”

Sewell allowed the motion, which legally confirmed Loren as my counsel.

Loren took a small step forward and away from me. I felt like I’d been left in a dumpster by my mother.

His voice was a little louder, then, with a suggestion of controlled authority in it.

“Your Honor, the defendant is before you now. We acknowledge receipt of a copy of the complaint, and waive a formal reading at this time. On behalf of Mr. Naughton, Your Honor, we ask you to enter a plea of not guilty to the charges.”

“Plea of not guilty entered to the charges,” said Sewell. He glanced at me, then at Zant.

Zant asked that bail be set at half a million dollars, citing my danger as a flight risk and my danger to the public of this fine county.

“That’s absurd, Your Honor,” said Loren. “The defendant has obligations here he intends to honor. He has a long and distinguished record—a record unblemished until now—of public service. He intends to clear that record by vigorously defending himself from these charges. He is, may I remind Mr. Zant, a public employee on a public employee’s salary. Half a million dollars’ bail is punitive and unnecessary.”

A low grumble rose from the crowd behind me. It stopped when Sewell peered back at them.

Zant cited my recent, unannounced, unapproved and against orders trip to “someplace in Texas” as an example of my state of mind and my proclivity for flight.

“Your Honor, the defendant took a leave on personal time to attend to personal business in Texas. No complaint had been filed at that time and we—”

“—Mr. Zant, the accused’s travel itinerary prior to this proceeding could not interest this court less. What are you asking me to do, Mr. Runnels?”

“Your Honor, we ask that the defendant be released on his own recognizance, to report as ordered for trial. He is neither a flight risk nor a danger in any way to any person.”

Victoria Espinoza’s voice cut through the air. “Your Honor, if I may—this defendant is a risk to every child he might come in contact with. He is precisely the kind of accused for which bail can act both as a guarantor of appearance and a protection for the People.”

An approving buzz issued from behind me. Sewell slammed his gavel down hard and the sharp report silenced the mob.

“Mr. Runnels?”

“Your Honor, we are simply asking the court to extend to Mr. Naughton the same respect and responsibilities the People were so willing to entrust to him before these allegations were created. He is, I’d like to remind Ms. Espinoza, innocent of all charges until proven otherwise. This piece of paper, Your Honor—the complaint—no more abrogates his twenty years of exemplary performance than it establishes him as a menace to society.”

Sewell glanced out at the crowd, the reporters, then down at me, and over at Zant and Victoria.

The room was nearly silent, but I could still hear a deeper hush descending upon it

“I’m going to set bail at one hundred thousand dollars, securable to this court by a signature bond only. Mr. Naughton, I don’t see you in flight or in commission of crimes while you behave yourself in my county. If you do, I’ll see that you pay for it in more ways than one.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I managed.

Yeah, we’ll shoot him dead!
someone piped from behind.

We’ve got Megan’s law!

Castrate him!

Sewell’s bailiff moved toward the seats, and the cat-calls stopped.

“Any more cracks from back there and I’ll throw you all out of my court,” said Sewell. “Every last one of you.”

The silence was begrudged and tentative.

Loren asked for a preliminary hearing, which was granted, date to be set by whichever judge ended up with the case for trial.

Loren bickered about the witness list being too wide in scope, but Sewell overrode him.

The gavel hit wood. Loren tugged me gently toward the door that would lead us back to jail, where I would be processed and released. I followed him easily, lightly—as frail and unresisting as a ghost.

I looked back to see Donna Mason watching me, with a small smile on her face. But how small that lovely perfect face was in the mob of citizens staring at me with absolute hatred in their eyes. I could hear the drone of their malice just beneath the shuffling of feet and opening of doors. It scared me.

Once out of the courtroom I shook Loren’s hand. I was trembling. I would have done almost anything in the world for him then. I was still uncertain that I was not in a dream, but this part of the dream was, by comparison, a lot better than what had gone on before.

“Call me when you land,” he said. “We’ve got some work to do. I’ll send Wilkers to help get you out with minimal circus atmosphere.”

“Thank you. But explain one thing to me now. How come they listed seven photographs on the evidence list? There were only three.”

Loren shook his head. “They got four more the morning you left for Texas. Another batch they found at Sharpe’s house. Allegedly, it took them that long to sift through his collection. And they found the negatives, too, for all of them.”

I looked at him, literally tongue-tied.

“What do the new ones show?” I finally managed.

“Same kind of stuff, Terry. Same place. Different girl.”

I
made it from the courthouse to the inmate transport bus without the press getting to me—they are kept behind a fence several hundred feet away from the prisoner loading zone. You can make it from the building to the bus in just six quick steps. I settled into my caged compartment at the back of the bus, the same ignominious chamber that had held me—for my own protection—during the short ride from jail to courthouse. But the photographers and professional shooters of video know their way around the county landscape, and at least a dozen of them were standing at the corner of Civic Center Drive and Fifth, where my bus was forced to stop for a light, and the caged compartment housing the animal Terry Naughton was duly photographed. I slunk down out of sight and felt the handcuffs biting into my wrists. There have probably been lower moments in my self-regard, but I can’t remember one, and that is saying a lot.

Through the good graces of Loren, I managed to get from the jail to the parking lot disguised as a custodian. Loren’s kindly assistant—Rex Wilkers—met me at the Intake-Release Center with a short-sleeved blue shirt that said “Allen” over the pocket, a matching blue cap and a stick-on mustache that matched my hair color not at all. I wondered if it was some wry joke on Loren’s part—the name
Allen
—then decided it was just something they had handy. But it worked. We embedded ourselves behind a pair of young Latino men who spilled into freedom and the waiting arms and kisses of a small crowd of relatives and friends. We cut across a sidewalk and used a relaxed but forceful stride to disappear into the parking lot. Wilkers had parked up close, and we were enclosed in the semi-security of his dark-windowed Porsche before anyone was the wiser. He dropped me off at the airport, and a few minutes later I paid my way through the long-term parking gate and rolled toward the Interstate.

The afternoon was breezy and warm and the hillsides of south Orange County were still green from the winter rains. The wild artichokes sprinkled the hills between the on-ramps with their thorny purple blooms. A flock of ravens pestered a red-shouldered hawk that was perched on the power line over an auto mall, but the old bird looked too tired to fly; he just hunched within his insolent feathers and ignored the cackling multitude around him. Hang in there, buddy, I thought: from a chickenhawk to a red-shouldered one.

I was driving toward home—Melinda’s, now—without any real idea of why. I was quite a bit less than unwelcome there. Maybe I would arrive as the search warrant was being carried out. And the friendly little hamlet of Laguna Beach was the last place I wanted my face to be seen. But still I headed south on the 405 until I realized the senselessness of it. Then I got off at a big retail complex and went to the movies. I sat in the middle of the dark and nearly empty theater, watching a Hollywood star solve a crime by cloning the memory of a dead victim via frozen seminal fluid implanted in a rat The rat had electrodes attached to its tiny conical head, which then translated its thoughts into 35 mm, SurroundSound images that advanced the plot, complete with music. What effects. I concluded idly that I was, and always had been, in the wrong business.

The haze descended again. I walked from theater to theater, trying to find a movie that might keep it away. No way. I watched the films through a filter I couldn’t take off, through the darkly clouded lens of my predicament. For a while I pretended that this was all over; I had been exonerated and offered back my job as head of CAY. I imagined walking into the department building for the first time, seeing my new work station—surely, the old one would have been turned over to someone else by then; I imagined looking into the faces of the deputies I worked with, and the secretaries and the support staff and the cafeteria workers and even Shopping Carter, and I wondered how on earth they would ever believe, ever
really, truly, 100 percent believe
that I was not just an innocent man, but a good one. It was hard to imagine. The Irish in me said to fight, hold up my head and walk proudly into whatever wrath awaited me in the coming days, and, later, when I was proven innocent, to do likewise with every person I encountered. I told myself that I would evolve to that, I would rise to the occasion. But for now I was defeated and I wanted little more than a dark room, a large bottle of Herradura and my laptop computer, through which I might contact I. R. Shroud and arrange through him to obtain certain images—just as someone before me, I had reason to hope, had already done.

I thought of Matthew, as I often do when I’m miserable. Good memories can help offset a bad present, but they can also make it worse. It’s always hard to remember the living, vibrant Matt, and not remember the cold, bluing boy who died in my arms as I ran up Coast Highway toward the walk-in clinic that hot summer day. In fact, the parts of that past always come together in my memory, to form a complete, contradictory whole. Matthew’s life becomes Matthew’s death. It is not a remembrance that heals the heart or comforts the soul. It is not a remembrance I can happily live with, but I can hardly conceive of living without it. A drowning man clings to small branches.

As I sat in the theater I thought of one of the last movies Matt and Ardith and I had really enjoyed together, which was
The Lion King.
I thought of all the merchandise that we bought for him, with pictures of the characters on it. Lion King coloring books. Lion King sing-along tapes. Lion King bedsheets. An aerosol can of Lion King shave cream and a wooden Lion King razor. I remembered bringing a chair into the bathroom for Matt to stand on as we looked into the same mirror and he mimicked my shaving procedure, remembered the way he got more of the stuff in his hair and ears than on his cheeks, remembered Ardith’s proud exclamations of smoothness as she ran her hand over his face when her men were finished. For a moment I could even smell the faint scent of the cream. I remembered the way that, even then, Matthew’s competitive spirit had shown itself: if I shaved one time, he would shave twice; if I shaved twice, he would shave three times; when Ardith judged our shaves as having the same closeness—she only did this once—Matt shaved again to come in first.

And, as I knew it would, thinking about my living son led me unwaveringly to his death. He was expired by the time we lay him on the doctor’s table and I was cleverly locked out of the examination room. I know that now. For five days Ardith and I waited with desperate anticipation for the autopsy results. We believed that the why of his death would free us from a mystery too heavy to bear.
Why? Why Matthew? Why us? Why me?
It didn’t. The facts of his death, when they were known, only filled us with a sense of luck-lessness so profound we could hardly look at each other after we knew them. I’m always saddened when I read of crime victims who believe that an arrest of the perpetrator, guilty verdict, a stiff sentence, a death penalty will bring “closure” to their agony. People want the mystery solved, the criminal put to death, the amends made. They think they’ll feel better, that it will put an end to their pain as they know it. For me, all the autopsy report brought was an unbearable acknowledgment of the permanency of Matt’s absence. I got fucking closure, all right. Final, absolute and irreversible. But this was not how I wanted to feel at all. I didn’t want closure, or anything like it. I didn’t want his memory to end on a table in a walk-in medical clinic. No. I wanted continuity. And not only a continuation of Matthew’s life—though I knew that was impossible—but a continuation of the life around me, of Ardith and me as husband and wife, of the pulse of our little household, of the paperboy in the morning and the mockingbirds in the evening and the long silences during which we would let our fingers touch across the dinner table and wonder. But we got closure to that, too, and plenty of it. We lost our way. The wind died. The compass fogged. Landfall vanished and the paddles were too small to get us very far. Where were we trying to go, anyway?

Be careful what you wish for.

What I saw most clearly about his death is what I always see: the top of his wet blond-brown head pressed into the crook of my neck, nearly out of eyesight, my big hand behind it, holding him close for warmth and safety and with the conviction that somehow my beating heart would connect to his beating heart if they were just held close enough—it
was
still beating, wasn’t it? Why are his arms suddenly loose and dangling? And I saw the fractured, up-and-down images along Pacific Coast Highway—the pink homes and white stores, the red oleander and the deep green pine trees, the bright cars and gawking walkers—as they wavered, laboring past us, saw me raising my knees high and digging my bare toes into the sidewalk and stretching my stride longer and longer and holding on to Matt for dear life as I gasped closer to the walk-in clinic. It seemed to get further and further away.

This is what I come back to when I think of him and this is why he is the most heartbreaking and beautiful memory in my life.

It was dusk when I drove past my apartment in the metro district. I had circled the complex twice, and the parking area twice, to see if I was being followed. There was no practical way that a reporter could find out about this place so quickly, but I also knew that some straightforward prying into my bank accounts—and the transfers wired to the management company here—would eventually blow my cover. A radio talk show was taking call-ins about me, and the thrust of the opinion was for life imprisonment, castration or execution. Everyone felt betrayed. The host was calling me “Naughty Naughton.” I couldn’t take much. Satisfied that my apartment wasn’t surrounded by a lynch mob, I parked and made my way in, hunched over like a tired Allen returning from his day on the job. I had a bag of fast food and a bag of Herradura.

Donna sat at the little dinette by the window. She gave a start when she saw my cap and shirt, and the ill-matched but successful mustaches.

She stood and we looked at each other for a long beat. Her dark eyes, simultaneously inquiring and restrained, were glassy and rimmed in red.

“ ‘Lo, Al.”

“Hi, Donna,” I said, uncertainly. “Check the oil and tires?”

“They’re in good shape.”

“Long day at the pumps.”

“I can imagine. Here …”

She walked across the room to me, lifted off my cap and gently pulled away the gummy mustaches.

“You looked petrified in court today,” she said.

“I was.”

“Runnels seems capable.”

“I think he is.”

“If you don’t know he is, get another lawyer.”

“I think he is, Donna, or I wouldn’t goddamned hire him, now would I?”

“I’m sorry. Settle down.”

“Settling down is not possible.”

“I know that… um … hey, I put some beer in the freezer.”

“Let’s quickly crack a couple.”

She put the mustaches inside the cap and set the cap on the kitchen counter. She put my fast food in the oven and my tequila in the refrigerator. I looked out the window while she got the beer. I was still looking out it when she handed me a bottle.

“I didn’t do it.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I absolutely did not do it. I know I sound like fucking O. J., but I
didn’t.
I didn’t do anything they say I did. The FBI will prove it. I’m getting my own examiner.”

She said nothing for a moment, but she let her eyes walk my face and pry my soul.

“I want you to know,” she said, “that if you feel a deep need to reassure me that you’re not a child molester then I’ll walk out of this apartment and out of your life, forever. I believe you and I’m in this with you. We have to get that part straight right now.”

I pondered this. “I needed to say it to you.”

“Said. Closed. Done.”

I felt a river of gratitude and love rush from my heart and charge into the channels of my body. I was shaking and there was a high-pitched whine arcing inside my head from ear to ear.

“Sit down, Terry. Drink your beer.”

I sat.

I turned on the TV and watched the local news. There was a brief report about me—no pictures except a personnel shot that I’m sure Ishmael leaked—and a video shot by Channel 4 that showed my transport bus. I watched it like it was a story about another human, wholly unconnected to myself. My heart raced and my head got light.

So I switched to the Angels’
Baseball Warmup Show.
Jim Edmonds talked about how he played the outfield, how if you weren’t willing to sacrifice your body out there, you’d never be a good fielder. He said he didn’t think about it, really, it was just part of his personality. They showed some clips of him picking fly balls off of wall tops, snatching hard line drives midrun, tumbling forever across a green field to finally rise with his arm stretched skyward and a white ball in his glove. He was so beautiful I wanted to cry. In fact, I did.

I was aware of Donna looking at me, then going into the bedroom. I heard the bathwater running. Then she came back past me and into the kitchen and shuffled in a drawer and walked past me again—past my riveted, teary-eyed adoration of Jim Edmonds making a perfect peg from center field to the plate—and into the bedroom once more.