In My Dark Dreams (2 page)

Upon seeing this travesty, half the jurors were mortified beyond belief, while the other half were laughing like hyenas. The judge, the Honorable Wilson Slocombe, a man who holds a very short leash himself, didn’t get the joke, not one bit. He was so pissed off he threw the whole shebang out then and there, even before Ronnie Shwarz, my colleague in our office who was handling the case, could move for dismissal because he was laughing his own head off.

I have tried to make Reggie understand that he didn’t win that case on the merits; he skated because of a once-in-a-lifetime screwup the police definitely will not let happen again. He inadvertently made them look like fools, which is why they set him up on the dope bust. They want him behind bars—payback for humiliation.

So far, Reggie hasn’t budged. His trial is in two days. This will be our last session before we meet again in court.

The wait to see him is interminable. It’s a little head game the jail sheriffs play. You grin and bear it because there’s no alternative. Finally, Reggie is brought in and seated in the chair across from mine. We’re meeting in a large room that is divided in half, wall to wall, by a thick Plexiglas window. The room is lit up like a football stadium with bright fluorescents to ensure that there are no shadows to hide behind. There is a strong odor of disinfectant to cover the BO from the hundreds of sweaty visitors who come here daily to visit the prisoners, who smell even worse. Reggie is wearing a standard-issue county-jail jumpsuit and is manacled head and foot. His hair is unkempt, and he looks as if he hasn’t shaved or showered for a couple of days.

Prisoners and visitors, including lawyers like me, talk through phone receivers. In the old days, pre-9/11, you could meet with your clients in a private room (which was only bugged some of the time). Now heightened security mandates that you talk to them over the phone through the Plexiglas window, like the civilians do. You are separated from the regular visitors to maintain the fiction of attorney-client privilege, but it’s a crummy way to communicate. If this were a really big crime, a life-without-parole or capital case, I could badger them into giving us our own space; but for a garden-variety charge like this, we’re just part of the deep-flowing river.

“How are they treating you?” I start out. I like to know. Sometimes it’s an issue.

“Okay,” he answers, waltzing past my tepid concern. We’re in the homestretch now, only a few more days (in his mind) before he walks out of the courtroom a free man. His mind is not a steel trap. “You got your shit wired, Miss Thompson?” he asks me, his voice chipper and upbeat. It’s the same question he always asks me.

“As ready as I can be.” My stock reply, but it’s true. I just wish I had more ammunition. If something doesn’t come up at the eleventh hour it’s going to be David versus Goliath in the courtroom, and I don’t have a slingshot.

“That cop that set me up. You gonna crush his lyin’ ass?” he asks now. Reggie is convinced the only reason they nailed him was because he was entrapped, that the police violated his civil rights. And it’s true—that’s exactly what happened. But that will not matter one bit. This is a dog-and-pony trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court, not a Harvard Law School evidence class.

“I’ll try my best.” I have to warn him: “They’re going to have their act together, Reggie. They’re not going to get caught with their pants down again.”

“They’re punks,” he says dismissively.

He needs an attitude adjustment, and part of my job is to give it to him. “You bring that vibe into the courtroom, you’re going to get whacked,” I tell him, fiercely. “These cops are on a mission, and the mission is to put you in the hole for a long time. A lot longer than the two years the D.A. is offering,” I yet again remind him. Jesus, what do I have to do to get this doofus to take the best offer he’s ever going to get in his life? He could pull five hard years if he’s found guilty, which is about as certain as death and taxes. More, if he really comes across as an arrogant asshole, which is more than likely. “That deal is still on the table, but once the trial starts, they’ll pull it.”

He shrugs off my plea with a dismissive wave of the hand, like a king giving his subjects the bird. “You the woman,” he says, as if he knows what he’s talking about. He picks at a piece of gristle wedged in his crooked teeth. “They gonna be some brothers on the jury?” he asks me, squinting his eyes in deep thought.

“I’m going to try as hard as I can. It’ll depend on the jury pool,” I answer honestly. “I don’t have a lot of control over that.”

Ten or fifteen years ago, a substantial number of jurors in the downtown courts would have been black—witness the makeup of O.J.’s jury. But the demographics have changed. Los Angeles is more and more Latino. A little over a decade ago, Tom Bradley, a black ex-cop, was the mayor, and he ruled with an iron fist. Now our mayor is Mexican American, and the power has shifted from black to brown. There are more Latinos in the state prisons and jails than blacks, and the wars between the black and brown gangs, both in and out of jail, get worse every year.

“Gotta get some brothers on the jury,” Reggie instructs me. He actually raises a finger to make his point, as if I don’t know what he means. “Not sisters. They be church women, too likely. A jury of my peers. Is that too much to ask for?” he asks rhetorically.

“I’ll do my best,” I tell him again. Which will be to persuade him to take the plea before the trial starts. I don’t have much time left to change his mind.

I’m ready to leave—I have a ton of other cases to deal with today. “Think about that offer,” I throw at him as my parting shot. “You could do a lot worse.”

“I’ll think about it,” he says by rote. “You gonna dress up nice?”

“What?”

“What you gonna be wearing in the courtroom,” he says patiently, as if he has to explain the basic facts of life to me. “Nice skirt and blouse. Stockings, quality shoes. Not this bag-lady shit you see some of them lesbian female lawyers wearing.” He tosses his head as if he has lice, which he might. I’ll remind him to take a shower and shampoo the night before we go to court. Whether his keepers will let him is anyone’s guess, it’s always chaotic in this place, and screwing prisoners over is considered great sport.

“I might not have no money,” he says defensively, “but I want the jury to see that my lawyer has class. So they know I have class,” he declares, sitting up straight in his plastic chair.

If we weren’t separated by the thick Plexiglas wall, I’d slap this moron upside his head. The last thing a lawyer wants, especially a woman lawyer, is to present a less-than-dignified image to a jury.

“I won’t embarrass you,” I tell him coolly. I jam his file into my bag—this session is over, mercifully. “Think about that offer,” I warn him again. “Pride goeth before a fall.”

Reggie stares at me, slack-jawed and uncomprehending, as I stand up. The deputy who escorted him down here immediately hoists him out of his chair and begins shuffling him back to his cell before I’ve taken two steps toward the door on my side. I don’t look back, but I can feel Reggie staring at me as I retreat.

The rest of my morning is spent jumping from one courtroom, lobby, and cubicle to another: conferences with prosecutors and judges, setting future trial dates, pretrial hearings with other clients (unlike Reggie, they can read the writing on the wall and will plead out), general court-calendar stuff. There are dozens of courthouses scattered all over Los Angeles County. I work in the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, on Temple Street in downtown L.A., which was named after the first woman admitted to the bar in California and a founder of the modern public defender system, back in the nineteenth century; she is a role model for all those women, like me, who have followed in her footsteps. It is the central office, and the largest. The courtrooms, officially known as departments, are spread out among several floors of the twenty-one-story building, which is also where our main offices—those of the public defenders as well as the main offices of the district attorneys—are located. Just as the central jail houses more prisoners than any other in the country, this building has one of the largest collections of courthouses. We’re Los Angeles—everything we do is supersized.

The Los Angeles County Public Defender’s office is the oldest and largest public defender’s office in the world. We have over 1,000 employees: 650 lawyers, 80 investigators, 50 paralegals, 20 psychiatric social workers, a handful of Spanish interpreters, other support staff. We also hire additional interpreters, as needed, for other foreign-language defendants. Last year, sixty-eight different languages were spoken in one or another of the Los Angeles County courtrooms.

We handle an incredible number of cases. In a normal year we’ll defend about 350,000 misdemeanors and 90,000 felonies. It makes for a heavy caseload—the average is twelve to fifteen new cases a month, with twenty to thirty cases outstanding at any given time. All of our work is criminal law; we don’t do civil cases. It’s a lot of work, and we’re always hopping.

It’s twelve-thirty; I break for lunch. I usually eat lunch at my desk. It’s the only free time I have during the day. Most of my colleagues can’t wait to flee the building at lunchtime, and occasionally I’ll join a group, but I need my solitary time. I function perfectly well in most social situations, but at heart I’m most comfortable when I’m by myself. My jagged and ultimately violent relationship with my mother reinforced that part of my personality, but I’m convinced I was hardwired from birth to be a loner. I understand that nurture has an important place in one’s personal history, but I’m from the school that believes nature trumps everything.

Today I’m feasting on chicken salad with real mayonnaise, macaroni salad, and buffalo mozzarella with fresh tomatoes swimming in olive oil. I prepare my meals at night before I go to bed, pack the food in individual plastic containers, and store them in the community refrigerator down the hall from my office. There are a lot of groceries stacked up here on my desk, and I don’t stint on the portions. If I have a break in the afternoon, I’ll often grab a milkshake from the coffee bar on the eighth floor. People who see me put all this food away marvel at how I can eat so much and not gain weight.

It’s a piece of cake, I tell them: when you’re running fifty miles a week you burn more calories than your body can possibly consume. Upon hearing my explanation, they nod sagely, then change the subject—everyone wants to lose weight, but that’s too rigorous for most folks.

“Damn, that smells good,” Joe Blevins exclaims as his head pops into my doorway. Joe is my boss, one of the senior deputies in the office in charge of assigning cases. “How much garlic do you use in that dressing?” he asks, sniffing the air.

The reek he’s inhaling comes from the olive oil on the tomatoes and cheese. I douse it liberally with garlic, for health reasons and to keep the werewolves and vampires and malodorous clients at bay. It’s an old family tradition, which I initiated last year.

“Forty cloves,” I tell him.

He laughs. “Seriously?” People aren’t always sure if I’m joking.

“Actually, three,” I confess. “But I do have a pea soup recipe that calls for forty cloves. From a restaurant in Guerneville, up in Sonoma.”

“With their crappy weather, they need forty cloves,” he remarks. Joe’s a dyed-in-the-wool Southern Californian, for whom everything north of Santa Barbara is enemy territory. You should hear him curse out Barry Bonds when Vin Scully is broadcasting a Giants-Dodgers game on the radio. The entire building shakes.

He sniffs again. “Does all that garlic help you run faster?” He knows I’m in serious training.

“No,” I answer, “but it keeps my pursuers at a safe distance.”

“You don’t have any courtroom appearances the rest of the day, I take it.”

“Actually, I do have one, but there will be nary a scent on my breath,” I promise him. I always gargle after eating garlicky food, as a courtesy to my coworkers. I wish the smokers, some of whom have really foul halitosis, would reciprocate, but few of them do.

“Now you have two,” Joe says, handing me a thin manila folder. “An arraignment, this afternoon.” He explains: “One of Lorrie Patuni’s kids got sick at school and she had to pick him up. Since you have a window, you can pinch-hit for her, if you don’t mind.”

Lorrie is one of the younger lawyers in the department; she handles arraignments. Arraignment presentation, the first appearance a defendant makes before a judge after being arrested, is one of the ways we break in new lawyers. The only time an experienced member of the staff does one is in unexpected circumstances like this. After defendants plead out, almost always not guilty, they are assigned the lawyer who will be with them for the remainder of their case. Selection is random—new case files, comprising a police report, rap sheet (if there is one), and the charges, show up in your mailbox, or they’ll be left on your desk, sometimes half a dozen at once. New assignments can be aggravating, because everyone feels like they’re overworked, and everyone is always complaining about the heavy caseload. The average number of active files for a senior PD is about thirty cases. The exception is murder cases. No one has more than two or three murder cases pending, because if one does go to trial, that’s all you work on; others on the staff have to pick up the rest of your work, so the system tries not to overburden any particular member. Sometimes, however, the distribution isn’t always equitable.

“No problem,” I tell him about pinch-hitting for Lorrie, who’s a sweetheart when she isn’t stressed by juggling being a mother to three young children and a full-time professional. We’re a collegial group—we try to help out each other. When you work for the government, your salary is set by number of years in service and department rank, not by how many cases you handle or win. It makes for a less ego-driven environment than the private sector, which is one reason I’m still here. “Where is it?”

“Department 83, Judge Rosen,” Joe tells me.

Judge Rosen’s first name is Judith. You call her Judge Judy at your peril. Other than that, she’s okay—competent, fair, and not too impatient.