Daughter's Keeper (14 page)

“Maybe there's some history there that you're not aware of. Or maybe the woman is a terrific mother, but she just doesn't understand how important the bond is.”

“Maybe.”

“You'll figure it out,” she said. Ruth always expressed an utterly unshakeable belief in Izaya's abilities, confident that it was only a matter of time before her son rivaled his famous father as one of the country's leading criminal defense attorneys. Because Izaya had been, for as long as he could remember, as convinced of his mother's infallibility as she was of his brilliance, her certainty generally made his own self-confidence come easily. Today, however, Ruth's conviction inspired in him an unfamiliar sensation—anxiety. He had failed to persuade the girl's mother to put up bond and had thus failed his client. Still, Ruth's serene and unequivocal faith in him made him feel guilty for losing patience with her.

“Hey, maybe I'll come by after work today,” he said. “We can watch a movie or something.”

“That'll be lovely. How about if I pick us up a pizza at the Cheeseboard?”

“Great.”

Izaya hung up the phone and debated whether or not to try Elaine Goodman again. He knew he should, but he dreaded the conversation that would, he insisted to himself, be pointless. There was no reason to devote more energy to this client than to any other. He had spoken to the mother; she had made her opinions known. There was surely nothing more he could do. He rubbed his face with his hands, sighed, and dug around in the papers on his desk, looking for the telephone number of the pharmacy. Before he could dial, the phone rang again.

“Izaya Feingold-Upchurch,” he answered.

“Hey, Gee. This Jamal. I done changed my mind about that plea agreement. That shit ain't gonna work for me.”

Izaya smiled ruefully, rocked back in his chair, and heaved his legs up on the desk.

“Jamal, how many times we going to play this back and forth? I've told you before, I'm only too happy to go to trial. I love making those asshole prosecutors earn their gold. But it ain't my ass that's going to end up in Lompoc doing a mandatory twenty if we lose. You plead, it's a guaranteed ten. That's half, Jamal. Now, you know and I know how strong the case they got against you. Is it worth ten years off your life just to give the government a workout? Maybe it is. Hell, it might be to me, if I was in your shoes. But it's not me that has to decide, Jamal. And we are running out of time.”

“Twenty years,” Jamal said.

“You know it.”

“That a long time, Gee.”

“Yes it is.”

“Ten years ain't no vacation, neither.”

“Nope.”

“But it sho' ain't no twenty.”

“Nope.”

“Let me ask you this. I know you a good lawyer. Ain't no way you could get me off? Some kind of technicality; some shit like that.”

There was no question in Izaya's mind. “Sorry, man,” he said.

The buzz of the silent telephone line filled Izaya's ear, and he fought the urge to hiss back at the guards he knew taped his client's jailhouse telephone conversations.

Finally Jamal sighed and said, “Take the plea, Gee. Just take it.”

By the time Izaya had put out that fire and the others that followed, there wasn't time to call Elaine Goodman again before her daughter's hearing.

***

When she was led back to the holding area after her meeting with her lawyer, Olivia saw two men sitting on a bench in one of the cells. The guard put her in the adjacent cell and walked out of the room. She and the men were separated only by a wall of bars. She looked at them. One, with dark hair and a thin, pockmarked face, appeared to be Latino. She opened her mouth to say something to him in Spanish when the second man spoke.

“Hey, honey. How about I stick my dick through these here bars and you blow me good?”

Olivia jumped and stared at the man. He was beefy, red-faced, and his biceps bulged out of the rolled-up sleeves of his orange jumpsuit. His arms were vandalized by blue, crudely drawn tattoos. He smiled at her, and she could see his gray, jagged teeth. A white string of saliva connected his upper and lower lips. It wobbled and broke as he stuck his tongue out at her and flicked it in and out of his mouth. Olivia heard a soft whimper. It was a moment before she realized that she had made the feeble sound.

With a bang, the door to the room opened. The guard stomped to a row of plastic chairs propped against the wall outside the cells. He sat down, took a rolled-up newspaper out of his pocket, and snapped it open. The inmate winked at Olivia, stretched out on the bench, and began to snore.

Olivia moved to the other side of her cell, stopping her nose against the smell of the chemical toilet. She wanted to close her eyes, too, but every time she did, her mind filled with the vision of a thick red tongue, a bead of saliva. She sat curled into a ball on the hard bench, afraid even to blink.

***

The magistrate judge's courtroom in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California had no windows. It was a small, elegantly appointed, wood-paneled room with rows of benches and a raised dais facing two wooden library tables. Elaine arrived early and sat in the rearmost row. She had gone home to change her clothes, and in her best suit, a moss green Anne Klein with a straight skirt that stopped just below her knee, she felt professional and confident. The judge would know, just by looking at her, that she was not the mother of a drug dealer. He would see Olivia for what she was, a confused young girl, the victim of some kind of misunderstanding. He would release her into her mother's care, where she belonged.

Elaine was the first person in the room other than a young black woman, her hair elaborately braided, her two-inch-long ­fingernails painted gold, who sat at a table immediately below the judge's bench, busy with a tall stack of papers and a highlighter. She glanced up once at Elaine, her face expressionless, and thereafter ignored her. After a few moments, the woman with the gold nails left the room through a door behind the judge's bench. A heavyset olive-skinned woman in her mid-sixties came in the rear door. Her eyes darted nervously around the room, settling finally on Elaine.

“This is court?” she asked.

Elaine nodded. The woman settled on to the bench in front of Elaine with a grunt. She turned around and said, “I here for my son.” She waited for Elaine's reply. Elaine didn't provide the reason for her own presence in that room; she just turned up the very corners of her lips in something that might be called a smile. The woman's face crumpled a bit and she turned back around. Elaine stared for a while at the back of the older woman's neck. The collar of her cotton blouse gaped, and her skin looked damp and tight, stretched over a thick roll of fat.

The door to the courtroom opened, and two men wearing brush cuts and identical navy-blue suits walked in. They were leading two other men, both of whom wore handcuffs and shackles. It took a moment for Elaine to recognize Jorge. She'd only seen him a few times, and, while he had always struck her as shy and unassuming, never had he looked this cowed and disheveled. His head was bowed, and when he raised his eyes and met Elaine's his face darkened, a flush appearing under his light-brown skin. He nodded at her once, and she turned away. She kept her eyes affixed to the American flag that hung to the side of the judge's bench as the FBI agents unlocked Jorge's handcuffs and seated him in the first row behind the little wooden gate that separated the front of the court from the rows of benches.

As Elaine stared at the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance automatically ran through her mind as though she were a child standing at attention in the beginning of a school day. She closed her eyes. She opened them only when she heard Olivia's voice.

“Mom?”

Elaine snapped her head around to the door. Olivia, also in handcuffs, was walking into the room.

“No talking,” said the man leading her, his voice not as gruff as his words.

Elaine nearly moaned aloud as she watched Olivia being led up to the front of the room and pushed into a seat across the aisle from Jorge. Elaine watched her daughter try to make eye contact with her boyfriend, who kept his head down and his eyes fixed firmly to the floor.

The door to the courtroom opened again, and a young, light-skinned black man with long gnarled braids loped in. One of the FBI agents rolled his eyes. The black man hustled up the aisle and leaned into the row where Olivia sat.

“Hey, Olivia. How're you holding up?” he asked.

Elaine felt a quick flash of concern, and then flushed in embarrassment. She told herself it was Izaya's youth that took her aback, not that she had expected him to be white. She felt almost irritated at the young man for having such a Jewish-sounding name, though she knew she couldn't have been the first person to have made that mistake.

Izaya looked across the courtroom at Elaine. “Ms. Goodman?” he called, his voice booming in the almost silent room.

Elaine nodded. Izaya patted Olivia on the shoulder and strode down the aisle to Elaine's seat.

“Hi,” he said. “In a minute the magistrate judge will come in. Have you given any more thought to using your house as security? It would really help me to get your daughter out of jail.”

Elaine's mouth felt dry, like sand. She wanted to say yes. She wanted to assure this young man that he could say whatever was necessary to help Olivia; that she was willing to do whatever it took. But she couldn't. She hadn't reached Arthur. It just didn't feel right to make this decision, one that affected him, too, without his input. Moreover, it didn't make sense to her that all this should really be necessary. Once she spoke to the judge, once he realized who she was, what she was, he would let Olivia come home. “I want to do that signing thing the pretrial services woman talked about,” she said.

Izaya sighed. “Right. Okay. We'll give it a shot.”

At that moment, another group of people walked into the courtroom, one of them a tiny woman who wobbled down the aisle, perched on high spiky heels. Her large behind was crammed into a black leather skirt and her breasts overflowed out of the plunging neckline of a purple ruffled shirt. She batted her Tammy Faye Baker eyes at Olivia's lawyer.

“Izaya,” she said in a squeak.

“Madame Watts-Thompson. A pleasure as always. Let's talk pretrial release.” He took the little woman's arm and walked up the aisle and through the wooden gate, leaving a gape-mouthed Elaine.
That
was the woman who would determine if Olivia would be released on bail? Elaine watched the simpering Miss Watts-Thompson arrange her files and folders on one of the wooden tables. Izaya sat on the table, one shiny-shod foot resting on the edge of the woman's chair, and leaned over her, whispering and occasionally motioning in either Olivia's or Elaine's direction. They were still deep in conversation when the clerk with the gold fingernails entered the courtroom and announced the judge.

Elaine was halfway to her feet when the judge mumbled, “Remain seated.” The fat lady sitting in front of her sat back down with an audible groan. The judge was a younger man than she had expected, no more than thirty-five, pink-skinned and puffy-faced. He had cut himself shaving, and wore his black robes with an air of self-importance somewhat marred by the large Band-Aid stuck to his chin. As he spoke, he patted at the Band-Aid without seeming to be aware that he was doing so.

“What do we have before us this morning, Miss Jones?”

The court clerk shuffled the papers on her table, held one up in a gold-taloned hand, and announced, “United States versus Goodman.” The phrase chilled Elaine. All at once, it didn't seem as certain that the judge would simply thump his gavel and let Elaine take her daughter home. It sounded as if the entire country stood in judgment and condemnation of her little girl. Olivia rose and stumbled through the gate to the podium. She stood next to her lawyer, looking impossibly small and innocent.

“Izaya Feingold-Upchurch, your honor, seeking appointment to represent Miss Goodman.”

The judge glanced down at a piece of paper. “The Federal Public Defender's office is hereby appointed. Mr. Feingold-Upchurch, would you like to be heard on the issue of bail?”

Elaine could see only Olivia's and Izaya's backs as they stood facing the judge's bench. Olivia's shoulders were hunched, and she had her arms crossed over her chest. Elaine could barely resist the urge to run up and whisper to Olivia to put her arms down. She recognized that stance. Olivia always crossed her arms like that when she was feeling most vulnerable. As a child she'd stood like that whenever she was in trouble, whenever Elaine had caught her sneaking candy bars or watching television before she'd done her homework. Elaine wanted to call out to the judge that her daughter only
looked
defiant and angry; that in truth, she was overwhelmed with panic and fear.

“Your honor, my client has exemplary ties to the community. Her mother, a pharmacist who lives and works in Berkeley, has agreed to act as surety for her daughter,” Izaya said.

Elaine listened closely as he described Olivia's job, her lack of a “serious” criminal record, the steadiness of Elaine's own life. The lawyer spoke fluidly and convincingly, and Elaine felt herself grow calm again. She felt a rising confidence that the judge couldn't help but be persuaded.

When Izaya finished speaking, the judge turned to a young woman sitting at one of the wooden tables. “Ms. Steele, what's the government looking for here?”

The prosecutor rose to her feet. She was a tall, angular woman with thick blond hair cut in a prim, chin-length bob. She had a long nose and wore just a trace of pink lipstick on her unsmiling mouth. Her clothes were impeccable; a black, expensively tailored jacket worn over a silk sweater in pink so pale it was almost white. Her skirt stopped just above her knee, revealing thin legs clad in sheer white stockings. Elaine glanced down at the attorney's feet. Her mother had always said you could tell a lot about a woman by the state of her shoes. The prosecutor's shoes were black leather pumps polished to a shine. They looked very expensive.